Except for the period of Reconstruction, Black voter suppression has been a constant in elections in the United States. Back around 1900, Black voter suppression took the form of terrorism (e.g., Ku Klux Klan), poll taxes, the grandfather clause, bogus literacy tests, and felony disenfranchisement.
Felony disenfranchisement is the state taking away the right of a person to vote because of their conviction on a criminal offense. White supremacists who pushed for laws to take away the right of African Americans to vote were openly intentional about it. At the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1903, Delegate Carter Glass made the following statement, “This plan [which included felony disenfranchisement laws] will eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State in less than five years.”
Unfortunately, felony disenfranchisement is still with us as a means of limiting the African American vote. Because of racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system, these laws have a disproportionate effect on Blacks and Hispanics.
One of every 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised (7.4%), a rate four times that of non-African Americans.
Disenfranchisement policies likely affected the results of seven U.S. Senate races between 1970 to 1998, as well as the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential election. In Florida, nearly 500,000 African Americans are disenfranchised, which obviously had some effect on the election in 2016 as Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in Florida was 113,000. If only 35 percent of these Black persons could have voted and they voted for Hillary Clinton at the average rate of all other African Americans (88%), Florida would have gone to Clinton.
In recent years voter suppression has intensified. Attention to the Russian interference in our 2016 election and the Comey October surprise have turned attention away from the real voting-rights scandal of 2016. This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots. Immediately after the decision, several states, including Virginia, passed laws with restrictions on voting. New rules included the following:
• Voter ID requirements
• Shortened in-person early voting periods
• Reduced opportunity to vote absentee by mail
• And various administrative practices like limiting polling places, etc.
The actual numbers are not known, but there were clearly thousands of uncast votes in the 2016 election as a result of voter-suppression measures. In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification mandated by the legislature.
In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012. Clinton received forty-three thousand fewer votes in that county than Barack Obama did—a number that is nearly double Trump’s margin of victory in all of Wisconsin.
Under the Voting Rights Act, states and localities with a history of racial discrimination needed to get permission from the federal government to enact any changes to their voting laws, in a process called “pre-clearance.” Before the Shelby County decision, nine states, mostly in the South – Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia – needed to get any new voting laws pre-approved. Some counties and townships in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Michigan were also subject to pre-clearance.
With pre-clearance no longer required election rules and procedures are moving consistently toward suppressing the vote. Voter suppression is a growing concern across the country. The latest goings-on in Georgia is a case in point, with reports of two-hour waits to vote—in early voting!—as a result of a reduced number of polling locations.
Further, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the candidate for governor, has been sued for suppressing minority votes after an Associated Press investigation revealed a month before November’s midterm election that his office has not approved 53,000 voter registrations – most of them filed by African-Americans.
Kansas, however, might have the most obvious voter suppression tactic. Dodge City, which is 60 percent Hispanic, will have just one polling place for 13,136 voters when the average polling place serves 1,200 voters. But get this. Blaming road construction, Republican officials have moved the polling place outside the city limits where there is no public transportation.
What a democracy!?
