Book Review: Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote
Carol Anderson’s essential One Person, No Vote tells how the Jim Crow era prevented African Americans from voting, offering some surprising facts about a story we thought we knew. It goes on to describe how the Right is using similar techniques to suppress voting by Blacks and others today.
Anderson’s book is breezily written and very engaging. However, it does pack a lot of information in, complete with references, so it is a satisfying book if you want to not just be activated by points of outrage but also informed. It is definitely written as a polemic against the forces of White supremacy – Democrats in the past, Republicans now – rather than an even-tempered academic study. Experts with more knowledge of this topic than I have may be able to find fault with the information, but as a novice I found it logical and self-consistent, something not every book on political topics achieves. Here rather than further review the book, I will summarize it.
Voter Suppression Then…
We all know that in the bad old days, Blacks were stopped from voting in the South because they lived in a society that was officially racist. What you may not know is that America’s enforcement of electoral apartheid was often written in race-neutral terms. In many cases, the rules sounded reasonable. For instance, voters had to pass a literacy test. In fact literacy laws said nothing about race. Or if people are going to exercise the right to vote, surely it is fair to make them pay a small tax to fund the election apparatus. What about felons? The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution explicitly makes an exception to the right to vote in the case of “rebellion, or other crime,” and so we can erect another color-blind barrier to voting.
The thing about all these color-blind laws was that they were made by people who saw color very clearly and were working hard to make sure that people of a certain color would not vote. Speeches, letters, and articles written by the legislators made the purpose of these laws very clear. In the 1920 election, the town of Ocoee, Florida (near Orlando) destroyed the entire African American community of the town, murdering at least 60 of them, when a black man tried to vote. No effort was made to punish the perpetrators. The success of these laws in meeting their racial goals was clear, with the number of registered blacks in Alabama falling from 180,000 to under 3,000 in three years. By 1940, only 3% of “age-eligible” blacks were registered in the South.
Race-neutral legislation can be deadly in a society in which everything is determined by race. Thus literacy tests are not race-neutral in states where African-American education was actively suppressed by the government. Poll taxes are a special burden when one race is kept largely in poverty by the other. Laws restricting felons’ right to vote are not neutral when one of the missions of law enforcement is to keep one race in “its place.”
Besides being applied in a society organized around race, race-neutral legislation can also be applied unequally in order to target one race. Give a hard literacy test to the blacks, an easy one to the whites. Help whites keep track of their poll tax records while blocking blacks’ access to information.
…and Now
The wave of Civil Rights activism in the 1960s swept away many of the old barriers against the Black vote, but voter suppression never entirely went away. Efforts to stop Blacks from voting got a tremendous boost in 2013, when a 5-to-4 majority on the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder against preclearance. Arguing that the country had grown out of its racist past, the Court declared that jurisdictions with a history of racially-motivated voting barriers could now change voting rules without clearing them first with the US Justice Department.
One way to suppress the vote is to block access to polling stations. Or as Ohio did, put one early-voting station in each county, regardless of whether the county has hundreds of thousands of residents – including a large fraction of African Americans – or a few tens of thousands of residents.
Florida, the third largest state by population, is perhaps the most consequential swing state and its Republican officeholders have worked especially hard to deter voters who are likely to vote for Democrats. A disproportionate fraction of people of color have been convicted of a crime, because poor people go to jail more, Blacks and Hispanics have a higher poverty rate than Whites, and drug laws are enforced less against Whites. Since voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative in 2018 to let ex-convicts vote after finishing their sentences, Republicans have been fighting a multi-year battle to prevent them from voting, wielding a maze of fines and fees so complicated even experts couldn’t figure out when someone had paid all the court-imposed debts (https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/politics/read-supreme-court-sotomayor-voting/index.html).
Students are another Democratic-leaning group. In 2014, the Republican Secretary of State of Florida banned early voting stations on state university campuses, though the order was eventually struck down in court (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-early-voting_n_5b58ea93e4b0b15aba94cb4c).
Voter Suppression Via ID Requirements
But the key weapon in the arsenal of 21st century disenfranchisement is the war against non-existent voter fraud. Voter suppression maestro Kris Kobach spent a year scouring the state of Kansas for such fraud, and only managed to prosecute half a dozen people, mostly elderly voters confused about the law. The overwhelming academic consensus is that identity fraud – voting by people who impersonate others or who don’t have a right to vote – is very rare. The penalties for such voting is stiff and the personal benefit someone gets for casting a fraudulent vote is small. If you were to organize fake votes on a large enough scale to affect a congressional or state-wide election, there would be a high probability of being caught. Go ahead and try to pay a few thousand people to vote a few times and see if no one talks to the news or the police.
Why focus on a problem which posed little threat? Because then you can use the solution to threaten undesirable votes. Once again, unreasonable fear is used to support policies that sounded reasonable in theory but could be weaponized in practice.
Requiring an ID to vote is a favorite response. It sounds reasonable, but is easy to skew. Allow ID’s that Whites are more likely to have, such as a gun license, but not ones that are disproprtionately held by people of color, such as public housing ID’s. Point out that an ordinary drivers license will do, but don’t remind people that Blacks and Hispanics are less likely than Whites to have one. For extra credit, reduce the number of Motor Vehicle offices in Black-majority areas, to make it harder to get one. That’s what Alabama did. A judge declared that North Carolina Republicans had focused with “surgical precision” on eliminating ID’s that Blacks would have access to. Texas waited to pass its ID law until two hours after the Shelby decision sweeping away Justice Department review.
Another favorite is to purge voter rolls. Look, there is a John R. Smith registered in South Carolina and another in Nebraska. Double voting! If it turns out they are two people with the same name, we’ll correct the mistake – eventually. Or look at this person who hasn’t voted in six years. We sent a postcard warning them that we are about to remove them from the rolls, but they chose to ignore it, or didn’t notice it in their pile of junk mail, so out they go. They’ll find out about it if they decide to vote next time. This technique can also be manipulated to target minorities.
Knowledge of this history is important in evaluating the news. The President obsesses over mail-in voting. You might consider security concerns to be a legitimate question – if you didn’t know that there has been a century-long effort to use neutral-sounding concerns to suppress minority votes. To help people of color and other marginalized groups to vote is not just a tactic to gain partisan advantage, but is an important part of making the United States a more complete democracy.