One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

278 Pages·2018·2.38 MB·English

by  Carol Anderson

To all of the voting rights warriors and activists who have fought and continue
to fight to protect Democracy
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation,
1941–1960
Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for
Human Rights, 1944 –1955

Contents
Foreword by Senator Dick Durbin
One. A History of Disfranchisement
Two. Voter ID
Three. Voter Roll Purge
Four. Rigging the Rules
Five. The Resistance
Conclusion. At the Crossroads of Half Slave, Half Free
Acknowledgments
Resources
Notes
Index
A Note on the Author
Foreword
by Senator Dick Durbin
In White Rage, Carol Anderson gave us a carefully researched history of
American civil rights and race politics from the Civil War to current times. Her
work marched us through the painful chapters of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the
Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement to the battles we face today.
When I read White Rage, I recommended it to my Democratic colleagues in
the U.S. Senate. Senator Harry Reid was so impressed that he invited Professor
Anderson to address our Senate Democratic Conference. Her passion and
scholarship made a real impact.
In her new work, One Person, No Vote, Carol Anderson turns her focus to the
central issue of racial justice in our time: the right to vote.
Under the specious banner of combating “voter fraud,” the Republican Party
has launched a nationwide voter suppression effort. Using voter ID laws,
reduced voting opportunities, gerrymandering, and even the national census,
Republicans clearly believe their future success depends more on constricting
rather than convincing the electorate.
When you follow the money behind this national push, the usual suspects
surface. The Koch brothers and their allies bankroll operatives like the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). They produce “model legislation” to
combat alleged voter fraud by requiring photo identification at the polls.
Republican legislators pass and Republican governors sign these laws, which
restrict and discourage voting by minorities, the elderly, the young, the poor—
anyone who might oppose their partisan agenda.
The rationale for these laws has been repeatedly debunked. For example, a
2014 analysis by Professor Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles,
found only thirty-one incidents of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions of
votes cast since 2000.
In 2012, as chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee
on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, I chaired national hearings
on barriers to the ballot in Ohio and Florida, states that had recently passed
restrictive voting laws. We called election officials of both parties, put them
under oath, and asked a simple question: What was the incidence of voter fraud
or voter irregularity in your state which gave rise to these state laws restricting
voters’ rights? Their answer was the same in both states: There were few
incidents, and virtually none was worthy of prosecution.
This lack of evidence underscores an ugly truth: It’s not “voter fraud” that has
inspired this new wave of voter suppression laws. Instead, it’s the same animus
that led to poll taxes, literacy tests, and the infamous Mississippi Plan, which
became the template for voter discrimination for decades. That ugly animus was
denounced in 2016 by a three-judge federal appeals court that examined a 2013
North Carolina voting law that required strict voter photo identification and
limited early voting. The law, the judges wrote, “target[ed] African Americans
with almost surgical precision.” This was no coincidence, the court found, noting
that “before enacting [the] law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race,
of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General
Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five
different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.”
Unfortunately, this movement is not confined to state legislatures. In his 2005
confirmation hearings to serve as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme
Court, John Roberts said that the right to vote “is preservative … of all the other
rights.” His new black robe was barely wrinkled eight years later when, in the
Shelby County v. Holder case, he cast the deciding vote to overturn a key
provision of the Voting Rights Act requiring preclearance of new election laws
in states with a history of voter discrimination. The Republican-dominated
Supreme Court gave a green light to the “No Vote” Republican strategy—and
the Voting Rights Act, which had enjoyed virtually unanimous bipartisan
support in Congress as recently as 2006, became a casualty of the GOP voter
suppression campaign.
Since then, efforts to restore the Voting Rights Act through measures such as
the Voting Rights Amendment Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act
have stalled in Congress. Meanwhile, Republican-led state legislatures continue
to enact laws making it harder for a significant number of Americans to exercise
their fundamental right to vote.
Evidence suggests that their plan is working. A recent study found that in the
2016 election, Wisconsin’s voter ID law deterred nearly 17,000—and perhaps as
many as 23,000—eligible voters in two counties from casting ballots. President
Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin was only 22,748 votes.
In her Shelby County dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that though
progress had been made in protecting the vote, Congress reauthorized the Voting
Rights Act in 2006 because “the scourge of discrimination was not yet
extirpated.” She was right.
As Carol Anderson makes clear in One Person, No Vote, the right to vote is
under even greater assault today. For the sake of those who fought and died for
it, it is up to all of us to insist that this most basic American right be protected.
Reading this well-crafted book will arm you with the facts.
One
A History of Disfranchisement
It was a mystery worthy of Raymond Chandler. On November 8, 2016, African
Americans did not show up. It was like a day of absence. African Americans had
virtually boycotted the election because they “simply saw no affirmative reason
to vote for Hillary,” as one reporter explained, before adding, with a hint of an
old refrain, that “some saw her as corrupt.”1 Another journalist concluded that
because Clinton lacked the ability, charisma, or magic to keep Barack Obama’s
coalition together, “African-American, Latino and younger voters failed to show
up at the polls.”2 As proof of blacks’ coolness toward her, journalists pointed to
the much greater turnout for Obama in 2008 and 2012.3
It is true that, nationwide, black voter turnout had dropped by 7 percent
overall. Moreover, less than half of Hispanic and Asian American voters came to
the polls.4 This was, without question, a sea change. The tide of African
American, Hispanic, and Asian voters that had previously carried Barack Obama
into the White House and kept him there had now visibly ebbed. Journalist Ari
Berman called it the most underreported story of the 2016 campaign.5 But it’s
more than that. The disappearing minority voter is the campaign’s most
misunderstood story.
One Person, No Vote seeks to change that. Minority voters did not just refuse
to show up; Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked
African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls. Pushed by
both the impending demographic collapse of the Republican Party, whose
overwhelmingly white constituency is becoming an ever smaller share of the
electorate, and the GOP’s extremist inability to craft policies that speak to an