# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
State lawmakers continue to introduce new restrictive voting provisions, and voter suppressive bills have begun to advance and become law.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Read a PDF of our statement .

Today, the United States House of Representatives voted to pass the voting rights and election reform bill, H.R. 1 (the "For the People Act"). Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) issued the following statement in response to the vote:

"We commend the House of Representatives for passing H.R. 1 today, as this legislation is critical to ensuring that every citizen can freely exercise their right to vote. Following the 2020 general election - in which we saw relentless and unprecedented efforts to suppress votes from communities of color - it is abundantly clear that sweeping, systemic change is needed to ensure that every voter can readily access the ballot box and make their voice heard.

"Over 130 years ago, the Supreme Court declared the right to vote as 'fundamental' and 'preservative of all rights.' That right is under concerted attack. This week, state legislatures across the country are churning out bills designed to make it harder for racial minorities to cast ballots and participate in the political process. It is more imperative than ever that robust federal protections are enacted to guarantee that voters can freely exercise this fundamental right, which is the cornerstone of our democracy.

"Now, that the House has acted, we call on the United States Senate to immediately take up and pass H.R. 1. Ensuring that this legislation becomes law is a crucial component of the broader effort to make our electoral system fair and accessible to all - especially those who have been historically disenfranchised."

###
Founded in 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the nation's first civil and human rights law organization. LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957-although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and shares its commitment to equal rights. LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or LDF. Follow LDF on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LDF Issues Statement on House Passage of H.R. 1, the "For the People Act"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today, the United States House of Representatives voted to pass the voting rights and election reform bill, H.R. 1 (the "For the People Act"). Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) issued the following statement in response to the vote: "We commend the House of Representatives for [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened, to great fanfare, in June of 2014, is housed in an austere wood-fibre-and-glass structure in downtown Atlanta. It is situated at 100 Ivan Allen, Jr. Boulevard, a street named for the late mayor who, on his first day in office, in 1962, removed the "White" and "Colored" signs from city hall. The civil-rights center-like the nearby King Center and streets around the city that have been renamed for the architects of the movement-is a step in the continued institutionalizing of Atlanta's history as a theatre of the struggle for racial equality. Its permanent exhibits, ever mindful of the nation's enduring racial inequalities, are nonetheless a kind of exultant retrospective: the objects on display there are artifacts of a moral triumph. Across town, in the state capitol, however, a different type of historical preservation has taken root, a campaign designed not to remember the ugliness of the past but to resurrect it.

Earlier this month, both of the Republican-controlled chambers of the Georgia legislature passed bills that would impede voting, particularly for African-Americans. The House bill proposes to shorten the period of early voting, prevent ballots from being mailed out more than four weeks before an election, reduce the use of ballot drop boxes, further criminalize giving food or water to those waiting in line to vote, and severely restrict early voting on Sundays, when many Black churches take their congregants to polling places. The Senate bill would cut mobile voting facilities, end no-excuse absentee voting, and require people who are qualified to vote absentee to provide a witness's signature on the ballot envelope. Additional proposals would end, among other things, automatic voter registration at the Department of Driver Services. All these measures are meant to diminish turnout and undo the state of affairs that led to Democrats winning the Presidential race in November and both Senate runoff races in January. The capitol sits in the state's Fifth Congressional District, which Congressman John Lewis represented until his death, last year. Lewis helped lead the fight for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law is justly celebrated in the civil-rights center, even as its intent is being eviscerated in the capitol.

Since the defeat of Donald Trump, voter-suppression efforts have emerged in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. But the campaign in Georgia has particular resonance, in part, because it is so blatantly egregious. Republicans argue that the bills are necessary in order to "secure" elections, but the November ballots were scrutinized exhaustively, and no significant instances of fraud were found. Because Raphael Warnock, the first Black U.S. senator ever elected from Georgia, won in a special election and has to run for a full term next year, control of the Senate could again depend on the state. Last Wednesday, Warnock delivered his first speech on the Senate floor, and tied the cause of voting rights to the fight over the filibuster. "It is a contradiction," he noted, "to protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society."

Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who became a target of Trump's rage and, as a result, may face a primary challenge, needs to ingratiate himself with conservatives, which suggests that the bills stand a good chance of becoming law. Yet the calculations are not just political, as Georgia's own history demonstrates. Amid the turbulence of the nineteen-sixties, Atlanta billed itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a slogan that James Baldwin, in his book " The Evidence of Things Not Seen," amended to "The City Too Busy Making Money to Hate." Atlanta's forward-looking reputation on race was intricately bound up with its perspective on commerce. Mayor Allen was elected on the basis of his prior leadership of the Chamber of Commerce, where he noted that formal segregation fed a perception of the city as backward, and hampered its efforts to attract investment.

In the decades since, this perception of Georgia has been true to a lesser but nonetheless significant degree. Racist policy is still bad for business: in 2019, following the passage of a restrictive abortion law that disproportionately affected women of color, Hollywood studios threatened to cancel productions in the state. (According to the Georgia Department of Economic Development, film production generated nearly ten billion dollars in revenue in 2018.) Stacey Abrams, who ran against Kemp that year, managed to talk some high-profile projects out of abandoning the state; the law was struck down last year. Today, eighteen Fortune 500 companies have operations in Georgia, the same number as in Florida, a state with twice the population.

The potential economic fallout of the voter-restriction effort started coming into focus last Monday, when the New Georgia Project, which has fought for equal voting access, staged a die-in outside Coca-Cola's corporate headquarters, to urge it not to support officeholders who vote for the bills. (The day before, the company had tweeted, "RT if you've ever hidden the last Coca Cola in the fridge"; the New Georgia Project replied, "RT if you've never backed anti-voting legislation.") Coca-Cola, which donated the site for the civil-rights center, is based in Atlanta, as are Delta, a founding sponsor, and Home Depot, one of whose founders is a major donor.

Nsé Ufot, the project's C.E.O., said that the action was part of a larger campaign. Companies "giving their employees the day off on Juneteenth and tweeting out the Black Lives Matter hashtag," she said, "are silent in this moment, while our right to vote is being attacked." In February, the Chamber of Commerce announced its "commitment to protect the votes and rights of all Georgians and the growth of free enterprise." Last week, Coca-Cola and Home Depot told the Washington Post that they support the chamber's position, while Delta called for "broad voter participation, equal access to the polls, and fair, secure elections processes." Salesforce, the San Francisco-based software company, which also operates in Georgia, took a more direct route, tweeting, "A person's right to cast their ballot is the foundation of our democracy."

It's possible that the state's current Republican leaders understand less about these issues than Ivan Allen did half a century ago. But there will be a cost-and not just a moral one-if Georgia continues its march backward. To the extent that there is an impediment to the leadership's plunging the state back into its ugly past, it will likely not be for love of democracy or the Constitution. It will be for reverence of another piece of paper that embodies deeply held American values: the dollar bill. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The High Cost of Georgia's Restrictive Voting Bills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened, to great fanfare, in June of 2014, is housed in an austere wood-fibre-and-glass structure in downtown Atlanta. It is situated at 100 Ivan Allen, Jr. Boulevard, a street named for the late mayor who, on his first day in office, in 1962, removed the "White" and "Colored" signs from city hall.

# data[].attributes.headline
Using Microaggression Theory to Examine U.S. Voter Suppression Tactics

# data[].attributes.subject
Using Microaggression Theory to Examine U.S. Voter Suppression Tactics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using Microaggression Theory to Examine U.S. Voter Suppression Tactics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Back to lesson plans archive

Lesson Plan: To Vote or Not to Vote

Estimated Time

Three to four 50-minute class periods (activities can be conducted individually)

Grade Level

8-12

Essential Question

Why is voting an important responsibility for citizens?

Objectives

Analyze the efficacy of messages encouraging people to vote

Examine the history of voting regulation since the Civil Rights Act of 1965

Analyze voting regulation between the states and the federal government

Analyze the potential power of the Latino vote

Evaluate the importance of voting

Overview

For many Americans, voting is not a "prime time" event. Less than 60 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2012 general election. Yet, for other Americans, voting is a very meaningful, almost sacred duty. In this lesson, students will view three short films that explore the importance of voting. Each film/activity examines the topic from a different, thought-provoking perspective. Show each film in sequence and follow with the discussion questions or activity provided. Culminate with an activity that revisits students' initial ideas about the importance of voting.

Materials

We The Voters film "First Time Voters"

We The Voters film "So You Think You Can Vote?

We The Voters film "Citizen Next"

Copies of Student Handouts:

Handout #1: Importance of Voting Survey

Handout #2: "So You Think You Can Vote?" 3-2-1 Strategy Chart

Handout #3: "Citizen Next" Graphic Organizer

Procedure
Day 1: The Importance of Voting
Opening Activity: Organize the class into small groups. Distribute Handout #1: Importance of Voting Survey to each group. Ask them to review several websites that provide reasons for voting (examples are listed on the handout) and complete the chart. Have students meet as a class and discuss the reasons the websites were effective in encouraging voters to vote.

Film Viewing: Keep students in their small groups and have students watch the We The Voters film more than once if necessary, and then discuss the post-viewing discussion questions below.

Film Summary: A farcical tale of José, a first-time voter, who sends a mixed message to his friend Olivia about his first time voting. The couple end their conversation still in confusion and José begins his journey to the polls. Suddenly, he is confronted by a middle-aged Agent of Negativity, who tries to convince him that voting is a waste of time, especially for millennials. The two debate the merits of voting all the way to the polling place. Olivia is there explaining to José that she's reconsidered his proposal to vote for the first time. Suddenly the two young people discover the Agent of Negativity's motivation for discouraging them from voting.
Post-Viewing Discussion Questions:
Discuss the following questions with students either in small groups or as a whole class.

What is the main message to José sent by the "Agent of Negativity"?

What are some of the arguments that José gives in response to the Agent's claims?

Explain how any of the following issues mentioned in the film might directly affect you: education; healthcare; immigration; minimum wage, environment, policing, foreign policy?

The film cites the statistic that millennials are one-third of all eligible voters-83 million people. How might this voting group have a big impact on the next election?

Day 2: Challenges to Voting
Film Viewing: Distribute Handout #2: "So You Think You Can Vote?" 3-2-1 Strategy Chart. Then, show the We The Voters film "So You Think You Can Vote?" more than once if necessary. Then organize a "four squares activity" with a quarter of the class in each of four corners of the room. Have students share things they learned from the film and one of their questions about the film's content with at least two people in the other groups.

Film Summary: Despite what you might have been led to believe, there is no "right to vote" in the Constitution. The film tracks the history of voting rights in the U.S., leading us to a newfound understanding of what obstacles might prevent us from casting our vote in future elections. Armed with that knowledge and a motivation to right that wrong, this film explores just what it would take to amend the Constitution today.

Bring the class together and have students ask the questions they generated in the second section of the chart and share their most memorable moments of the film.

Go a little deeper into the film's rich historical content. Divide the class into six groups and assign one of the following key points from the film to each group. Have students conduct quick research on their topic question using the resources listed below and others. (This can be done as a homework assignment.) Have students prepare their findings and present them to the class.

What does the Constitution say about who regulates voting? (See Article I, Section 2, Clause 1, U.S. Constitution). What do the following Amendments to the Constitution say about voting? The 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th amendments (, http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000649)

How have some states, particularly in the South, placed barriers to voting? (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html )

How did the 1965 Voting Rights Act help African Americans overcome legal barriers that prevented them from voting in some state and local elections? (History.com http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement/videos/voting-rights-bill, LBJ speech before Congress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcBL9pZ9Znw, key excerpts from the speech http://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/extra/app/uploads/2013/11/johnsonspeech.pdf and Impact of the Voting Rights Act https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/immediate-impact.html )

Describe the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby v. Holder and explain how it overturned a key provision in the Voting Rights Act. Review the dissenting opinion. (Oyez https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96, FRONTLINE http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/with-voting-rights-act-out-states-push-voter-id-laws/)

What are voting ID laws and what is the controversy that surrounds them? (FRONTLINE: Voter ID Laws http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/fln33-soc-voterfraud/wgbh-frontline-why-voter-id-laws-arent-really-about-fraud/ , and http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/why-doesnt-everybody-have-a-voter-id/) How have some federal courts responded to these voter ID laws? (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/02/488392765/as-november-approaches-courts-deal-series-of-blows-to-voter-id-laws)

Discussion Questions
Discuss the following questions with students as a whole class, with each group contributing their findings to the discussion.

Why do you think the Constitution left to the states the authority for regulating voting? Throughout history, what have been the pluses and minuses of this for some voters?

What were some of the voting "tests" Southern states devised to restrict African Americans from voting? How did the Voting Rights Act take some of this authority away from the states, and what were the results?

Describe the effect the decision in Shelby v. Holder had on the Voting Rights Act. What was the Court's reasoning in the majority decision? What was the dissenting position? Which side do you agree with and why?

Describe some voter ID laws that were enacted in some states and how recently federal courts have responded to them. Do you agree or disagree with these courts' decisions and why? Because of these states' actions and the federal courts' decisions, do you think the Supreme Court should reconsider the Shelby case? Explain.

Day 3: Expanding the Right to Vote
Film Viewing: Distribute Handout #3: "Citizen Next" Graphic Organizer and have students watch the We The Voters film "Citizen Next," more than once if necessary. Working in small groups, have students complete the handout. To promote good question writing, have students use the summarizing points and their film notes on the organizer to formulate questions they are most curious about. Bring the students/groups back to a whole class discussion after viewing, having students pose their questions to the class.

Film Summary: Immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants, face many challenges to becoming U.S. citizens: the cost, the difficulty learning English, anti-immigrant sentiment, and more. Immigrants may want to become American citizens for many reasons: the United States is their home, the time is right, they want to benefit their families, with citizenship comes civil and legal rights, with citizenship comes the right to vote and have a voice. The film concludes at the citizenship ceremony where the new citizens testify to why they became so.
Post-Reading/Viewing Discussion Questions
Article Investigation: To provide students with some background on the potential of Latino and particularly millennial voters, have students read the PBS NewsHour article, "Latino millennials could be major voting bloc-if turnout is high enough." http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/latino-millennials-could-be-major-voting-bloc-if-they-vote/

After reading the article and viewing the film, have students discuss the following questions either in small groups or as a whole class:

What potential voting power do Latinos have in the United States?

According to the article, why does the Latino millennial population have the lowest voter turnout-behind African Americans and whites?

Why might lower voter turnout in key "toss-up states" change the outcome of this election?

The article was written in January 2016, before each major party had nominated its candidate. How might Latino voters respond to the two current presidential candidates? Have students discuss their preference for the two candidates running for president and their reasons why.

Culminating Activity: Have students return to the opening activity in this lesson where they took the "The Importance of Voting Survey." Ask students to reflect on what they've learned since taking the survey and explain if any of their survey answers would change. Has their initial answer to the question, "What value do you see in voting?" changed? If so, how? If not, why not?

Extension Activities:

Have students conduct a voting survey in their school or community on an issue they feel is important. This could be completed with an online voter survey tool like Survey Monkey, Zoho Survey, or QuickSurveys.com. Have them tabulate the results and summarize how the survey respondents feel about the issue.

Have students do an even deeper exploration of voting rights and attempts by states to restrict voting of certain segments of the population, beginning with the black codes of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the more recent enactment of voter ID laws. What have been the reasons for states to enact these laws and what have been the arguments against them? What is the overall effect of these laws on certain portions of the population's right to vote?

With the knowledge and understanding students have gained from this lesson, have them formulate a public awareness campaign to alert their peers and members of the community to the importance of voting. They can present their findings in a hard-copy pamphlet, or an online blog or social media post.

Additional Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lesson Plan: To Vote or Not to Vote | Lesson Plan | PBS NewsHour Extra

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why is voting an important responsibility for citizens? Less than 60 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2012 general election. Yet, for other Americans, voting is a very meaningful, almost sacred duty. In this lesson, students will view three short films that explore the importance of voting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ALL IN: THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY examines the issue of voter suppression in the US. The film interweaves personal experiences with activism and historical insight to expose a problem that has corrupted our country from the beginning. With the expertise of Stacey Abrams, the film offers an insider's look into the barriers to voting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Suppressed: The Fight To Vote - FULL FILM • Feat. Stacey Abrams • BRAVE NEW FILMS (BNF)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
EMERSON SYKES
[0:04] From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host. As Black History Month comes to an end, we've invited Professor Carol Anderson to discuss ongoing voter suppression efforts in the United States. We'll also discuss an untold story in Black history about how the civil rights movement in the U.S. supported anti-colonial and human rights activists around the globe. Dr. Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University and chairs the African-American Studies Department. She's also a rare historian who can speak clearly and compellingly to the current moment. Professor Anderson, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Welcome to the podcast.

CAROL ANDERSON
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

EMERSON
I wanted to start with some of your early scholarship which relates to the role of the NAACP and other organizations in anti-colonial movements. Can you tell us a little bit about that underreported story?

CAROL
Oh, absolutely. And you know you just made me smile by going back to the older stuff so thank you for that. The NAACP has a reputation as being this kind of stodgy state organization that only dealt with legal issues, as if legal issues weren't important issues. But as I'm going through their papers I found this incredible vision and activism that they had on the global stage. One was the activism for human rights, where the NAACP conceptualized -- and this is in the 1940s -- conceptualized the struggle for Black equality as a human rights struggle, not a civil rights struggle.

And that meant that it encompassed not only what we understand as the constitutional Bill of Rights -- the right to free speech, the right not to be illegally searched and seized, the right to a fair trial -- but also the right to education, the right to housing, the right to a living wage, the right to healthcare.

[2:08] And they took that battle all the way to the U.N. and helped craft language in the U.N. Charter guaranteeing human rights and against discrimination based on race and sex and religion, etc.

On the colonial front, the NAACP wasn't always necessarily the group out there in the streets. But they worked to reshape the norms of colonialism

They took on some heavy, heavy issues such as apartheid in South Africa. It was the work of the NAACP that in fact helped lead to the the U.N.'s commission looking at apartheid, which was amazing because here you have the U.N. saying what you are doing internally so violates the basic human rights and it violates the peace, that we have the right to look at what you're doing internally. We have the right to basically breach your national sovereignty. What you're doing threatens to destabilize the world.

And that was the handiwork of those in the NAACP. I see this again with their work in what was called the Italian colonies issues, as well as with the work with Indonesia as Indonesia is trying to get free from the Dutch.

So I mean, when you're thinking about these liberation struggles, these freedom struggles, the NAACP was all there and all in.

EMERSON
Well it's a really fascinating piece of history that not many people are aware of. It brings up a few themes that I find interesting.

One is this relationship between the NAACP, which is deeply rooted in the specificity of the Black experience in the United States, and building these linkages with other global activists. I'm wondering how the sort of interplay between race as a highly contextual and specific experience in each society translates onto the global perspective, where you have activists of different backgrounds coming from very different societies trying to come together around shared ideals. Is this a case of folks just finding ideological alliances across borders, or was it around some shared identity?

CAROL
[4:24] It was around a shared sense of oppression. Walter White at the time, who was the head of the NAACP, said basically that it would be foolish to think about that what we're dealing with here is only an American issue. Jim Crow is only an American issue. White supremacy is only an American issue. He said, you know, it's like only dealing with what's happening to the Negroes in Mississippi and missing what is happening to them in Massachusetts. And it's the same thing. They understood that white supremacy as an organizing principle was a global phenomenon. And so that phenomenon was the one that propped up Jim Crow, was also the one that propped up colonialism.

And so if you took it down in the United States but left it standing everywhere else, you hadn't done the work, because the work for freedom was a global struggle. What the NAACP also recognized -- in 1945 it held a colonial conference before the war's end, World War II ended.

And that was to have representatives from Africa and Asia meeting to map out their vision of what a post-war world looked like, because the European powers and the US were mapping out their vision of what that would look like, but they had excluded most of the people on earth. And so as they're thinking about what this looks like, they were building it on a human rights frame: indigenous control of natural resources. That there would be labor standards and labor rights. That there would be universal education. This is the plan that they're mapping out about what freedom would look like.

[6:10] The NAACP also understood that it could not take the lead, for instance, in what was happening in Somalia or what was happening in Indonesia, but that it had a role to play and that it was willing to play that role. Here in the U.S., in its work with the State Department, its work with the U.N., its work with the White House, in order to begin to shatter those norms that colonialism was acceptable.

EMERSON
I'm interested to get the update on this story. Where do you see any continuation of this legacy of collaboration between civil rights activists in the U.S. and activists more globally? Is that still an ongoing dialogue?

CAROL
Oh I see it. It's like, when you think about the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter has been working through, for instance, the indigenous people's rights, has been working through what is happening on the West Bank. They have been thinking through and advocating for those who are fighting for their freedom.

EMERSON
Well thank you very much for sharing that fascinating story about the NAACP and the civil rights movement.

If we can just shift to what's going on now in terms of voter suppression and specifically the things you cover in your recent book, One Person, No Vote. What do you think are the biggest problems now in terms of voter suppression?

CAROL
Oh yes. I think the major change was the U.S. Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision which gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act set the standard about what states had to do in order to be put under the Department of Justice's preclearance provision.

[8:00] And preclearance meant that before this jurisdiction could implement a voting law, it had to be okayed by the U.S. Department of Justice or by the federal court in D.C. And in order to get there, there were these standards that the state had to meet. So it basically was that you discriminated actively against your minority populations to stop them from voting, that you were violating the 15th Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts gutted Section 4. And so that basically ended preclearance. And it threw the United States back to the era where everything had to be litigated, so that the states were able then to just go hog wild implementing voter suppression laws that then the ACLU and the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund and the League of Women Voters were all having to go to court and take these states back to court over and over and over.

And so what do I mean? Like voter I.D. laws. Voter I.D. laws on the surface sound reasonable, that you want to make sure that the person who is voting is actually that person. But it has been couched in terms of stopping voter fraud.

That kind of in-person voting voter fraud is so rare that there are like a bajillion zeros in front of the percentage in terms of how often that happens. Justin Levitt, a law professor out of California, he looked from 2000 to 2014 and found 31 cases of voter fraud out of 1 billion votes. That's the so-called rampant, massive voter fraud -- about two cases per year -- that is used as the justification for voter I.D.

[10:06] States like North Carolina went through and got data in terms of who had what kind of I.D. And they got that data by race, and then they made the kinds of I.D.s that African-Americans held the least in order to vote. Or you look like, at a state like Alabama. What Alabama did was to say you've got to have government issued photo I.D. in order to vote.

EMERSON
So what's been the impact that we've seen on turnout among Black voters?

CAROL
Oh, it has been disastrous. For instance, in Wisconsin they implemented a voter I.D. law there, Scott Walker. This is a Republican initiative where you have a Republican governor and a legislature that is controlled by the Republicans.

And the impact was that in the 2016 election there were 60 thousand fewer votes from the 2012 election. Sixty-eight percent of that drop off came out of Milwaukee alone, where 70 percent of the Black population in the state lives. Political scientists out of the University of Wisconsin ran the numbers, and they found that eight percent of whites were blocked from voting because of the I.D. laws and 27 percent of African-Americans were blocked from voting because of the I.D. laws.

When you think that Trump won -- and I put that in quotation marks -- Wisconsin by a little over 20 thousand votes, we see the impact that these voter I.D. laws have. What Scott Walker did is he began saying you've got to have an I.D. to vote, government issued photo I.D.

[12:04] Then he began to mess with the placement and the hours, the location of the Department of Motor Vehicles in the city of Milwaukee. So you create the obstacle to the ballot box -- you must have an I.D. -- and then you create an obstacle to the obstacle by making it very difficult for people to be able to get that I.D. by shutting down these kind of state-controlled facilities and making them less accessible to the population.

EMERSON
Well these voter I.D. laws, as you say, seem reasonable on their face but the disparate impact is quite dramatic. I had not heard the story of the sort of spreadsheet being sorted by race and picking the one from the top. But it's quite a dramatic picture of how these voter I.D. laws are used to target certain types of voters. And voter roll purges I think have also sort of been designed, even though they seem like a straightforward way of keeping the voter rolls up to date, the disparate impact has been dramatic there as well.

CAROL
Oh, absolutely. And you know, I'm in Georgia where Brian Kemp was the Secretary of State starting in 2010 until 2019 when he assumed the governorship. In the first few years of his watch, 1.4 million people were purged off of the voter rolls. So these are registered voters who are purged.

Now the line becomes -- again, it sounds reasonable -- we have to maintain the voter rolls. When people move or when they die, they shouldn't be on the voter roll and when they moved out of the district, out of the precinct, out of the state. That sounds reasonable, but that's not how their algorithm works for whom to purge. They decide -- "they" being these really aggressive secretaries of state like John Husted out of Ohio, Brian Kemp out of Georgia -- is to go after those who don't vote regularly in every election.

[14:05] And what that does is -- it's just like the Mississippi Plan of 1890 which was the rise of Jim Crow and the rise of this massive disfranchisement, with like literacy tests and poll taxes -- is that you don't say, "We don't want Black people to vote," because that would just be too blatant and violate the 15th Amendment. So you use the characteristics of a people, the societally imposed characteristics. We know that minorities don't vote in every election. We know that the poor do not vote in every election.

And so to remove from the rolls those who don't vote regularly, what you're basically saying is that we're removing young people and we're removing minorities from the voting rolls. And that's what they've done. In the last two years between 2016 and 2018, Brian Kemp removed 10.6 percent of registered voters from the rolls in Georgia, and disproportionately they were minorities.

EMERSON
And of course, the conclusion of that story is that Brian Kemp himself, who had been the Secretary of State, then won his election as governor.

CAROL
Yes. So, I liken it to you're the director of the lottery and you certify that all of the equipment and all of the balls really are functioning the way they're supposed to. And then you just, oh, happened to pull the winning lottery ticket. That's what happened here. We had so much chicanery happening in this election here in Georgia. So for one thing, there's a thing called Exact Match.

Previously, the courts had ruled that the Exact Match program was racially discriminatory. The way that Exact Match works is that when you fill out your registration card, then the Secretary of State's office compares it to the information that's in the state's database -- the driver's license database or the Social Security Office database.

[16:09] If the information does not match exactly, your registration is put into pending status. By not matching exactly things like an accent -- so if your name is Renee and you write it with an accent over that second "E," but on your driver's license there's no accent there, then boom, it's put into pending status.

If your name is Carlos Marquez-Garcia and you write it with a hyphen between Marquez and Garcia, but there's no hyphen in the driver's license, boom.

What happened then, with Exact Match, is that it privileges anglicized names. So when the court said this is racially discriminatory, then the Georgia legislature, which is heavily gerrymandered, passed a law for Exact Match that basically replicates the racial discrimination in the policy that the court said was absolutely racially discriminatory. And in this last election in October, it was clear then that 53,000 voter registrations were put on hold, put into pending status.They weren't put on the books.

EMERSON
Just in Georgia alone.

CAROL
Just in Georgia alone, 53,000 using Exact Match. Turned out that over 80 percent of those were minorities.

EMERSON
Wow.

CAROL
We also had over 200 polling places closed and most of those in minority communities. And not having enough machines. He basically held off on buying new machines, although he sat on over 10 million dollars worth of federal funds for new voting equipment. So we ended up with like four plus hou lines in communities in Atlanta because of lack of working proper voting machines.

EMERSON
[18:07] Well we know the impact that these types of measures had in Georgia and particularly in the Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp race.

But I wonder if you can maybe take a step back and evaluate the 2018 elections overall in terms of voter suppression. What do you think are the lessons that we can learn from this midterm?

CAROL
What we saw was this massive incredible ground game from civil society, from the ACLU, from the LDS, from the League of Women Voters, from Vote Riders, from Black PAC, from Let America Vote, doing the heavy lifting of democracy by going out and registering people to vote, by explaining voting laws, by taking these jurisdictions to court when they were implementing or trying to implement racially discriminatory voting laws and by setting up pools that can drive people to and from the polls to make up for the loss of polling stations in their communities.

And so, we had a voter turnout rate that was the highest it had been since the 1920s.And we can never ignore the desire of the people to have a say in the policies that govern their lives. It flipped the house.

EMERSON
Well it seems like there's a clear sort of tension where we have some dramatic expansion in voting access in some states including in Florida, while also these rampant voter suppression efforts in other states. How do you reconcile these two dynamics? Where do you see this going in the future?

CAROL
[19:55] You know, one of the things that I talk about at the end of One Person No Vote -- and actually I'm writing the midterm epilogue as we speak -- is that you're seeing a nation that is basically being ripped asunder from these two very different visions of democracy. On the one hand you have states that are working overtime to figure out how do we expand access to the ballot box for our citizens? And so you've got automatic voter registration. That started in Oregon and has begun to really gain traction in many states across the nation. You've got same day registration.

You saw numerous states like Michigan that has been heavily gerrymandered and where you've got a political leadership that is not aligned with the people and the people's desires. And so the people then put initiatives on the ballot in November dealing with opening up access to the ballot box.

The testament to that is that you then had these lame duck sessions of Republicans, who were going to lose their super majorities in the legislatures, using that lame duck session to then annul or weaken the ballot initiatives voted on by the people.

EMERSON
Wow.

CAROL
So I think it was in Michigan, for instance, they voted for same day registration.

And the legislature then said mm-mm, and pushed it back to something like two weeks before or a month before, something like that. So same day registration, which is to help ease access to the ballot box then becomes one where you've got to have it done weeks in advance in order to be able to vote.

EMERSON
Which defeats the whole purpose.

CAROL
You're getting the legislature short circuiting the will of the people.

EMERSON
[22:01] Well we've got this really dramatic situation where one party is very firmly in favor of expanding access to the vote, while the other party is trying to limit it at every turn. But one issue that has not been historically partisan is one of gerrymandering. And so I wonder if you can just talk a bit about the racial dynamics of gerrymandering, but also how it, at its core, is also political and it's a much harder problem to solve.

CAROL
The Constitution says that after the census, that then the legislative body is to redraw the districts to take into account population shifts. And those population shifts can mean that if you've got more people coming into your state you get additional representatives in the U.S. Congress. If you've lost populations, you get fewer.

Well what these legislative bodies have done, and I'm going to take Wisconsin on this one because Wisconsin is quintessential in this. What Wisconsin did after the 2010 census is that a handful of Republicans went into a hotel room and basically, for all intents and purposes, locked themselves in there for four months with high powered mapping software.

Their goal was to, as they said, ensure that no matter how many votes Republicans received, they would always control the state legislature. So think about that as a democratic principle: Even if we receive fewer, we will always have more. And that was the goal.

They also wanted to eliminate as many competitive districts as possible, because when the districts are competitive, it heightens voter turnout, because people believe that their vote counts. But if you get rid of competitive districts, it just feels like the system is rigged and your vote doesn't count and you stay home. We know this from the research.

[24:11] The first election out, Democrats received 52 percent of the vote, but gained only 38 percent of the seats in the legislature. And what that is designed to do is to weaken the influence and the representation of these large urban areas, the cities, and that means because many African-Americans and Latinos live in the cities -- not all of them, of course -- but it is to weaken their political voice.

And their political and policy needs and concerns while heightening those who live in the rural areas, who tend to be overwhelmingly white and Republican.

EMERSON
And courts have stepped in to strike down gerrymandering plans where it's clear that there was some element of racial bias or animus, either explicitly or implicitly, as part of the plan. But what the court has not yet been willing to say is that there can be limits on explicitly partisan gerrymandering; that is, based on giving your party, as you said in Wisconsin, permanent political power.

There's a few different ways that people have tried to think about solving this issue and some of them involve sort of complex algorithms that show which plans place the most value on each individual vote. Do you think that there's a sort of mathematic or algorithmic answer that can save our democracy in this regard?

CAROL
Actually there was, and it was one of the last cases that Justice Anthony Kennedy saw... And it was tailor-made for him. And it was the case Gill v. Whitford coming out of Wisconsin, this very issue of extreme partisan gerrymandering.

[26:11] Legal scholars and political scientists had developed an algorithm to talk about basically wasted votes. This algorithm allowed them to be able to make the distinction between places like Wisconsin and North Carolina that are heavily, heavily gerrymandered and places where it isn't.

And the Supreme Court sidestepped that basically on a technicality and did not rule. But the algorithm is out there.

But what gerrymandering does, and this is where we also have to be clear is that -- you know, when you think about what the polls say, for instance, banning bump stocks and semiautomatic weapons, about access to affordable health care, about the tax bill, the polls went in one direction and the U.S. Congress at the time went in another.

EMERSON
Well the sort of impact on representative democracy that is presented by this extreme partisan gerrymandering sort of hangs in the balance as we wait for the Supreme Court to weigh in.

What are the other issues that you see as pending or, or most active between now and the 2020 election? What should we be on the lookout for, either more of the same or is innovation pushing in any particular way when it comes to vote suppression?

CAROL
One of the things that we're watching here in Georgia is the decision about what kind of voting machines to use. The current ones run on Windows 2000 and are easily hackable.

[27:58] And there were a couple of lawsuits from 2016 and 2017 saying that in fact the machines were hacked, and then the servers were mysteriously wiped, so making it very difficult to do that kind of forensic analysis. And our machines here in Georgia don't have a paper trail, so all you've got are the electronics.

And the decision right now that the state is making does not appear to be the one that is most viable and most cost effective, which deals with hand-marked paper ballots. Instead, it appears that they're trying to go to another type of machine that will render a lot of the same problems. And if you begin to think about how the Trump administration is disbanding the Department of Homeland Security's divisions or the coalitions that are dealing with hacking, foreign interference and hacking of voting machines, of our elections. It, mmm, it smells. It's not passing the smell test. That's something to be concerned about.

Also to be concerned about was the U.S. Supreme Court decision that said that it was okay to purge voters who did not vote regularly. So that is giving a green light to these really aggressive Republican secretaries of state, who are dealing with what I call a demographic apocalypse, in that the Republican Party -- their response has not been to reform and to figure out how to broaden their policies, but in fact to shut down the members of the electorate that they believe will not vote for them.

[29:55] One of the things, for instance, that we just saw happening in Texas was that the Secretary of State issued this big press release about how 95 thousand non-citizens were on the voter rolls and 58 thousand of them have voted in a previous election. But it's a lie. They knew, they used a flawed database. They didn't take into account that from the time that they got the information from the Department of Public Services about who got a driver's license and who was not yet a citizen and the time that people got their citizenship -- lots can happen in six years.

We've got to be mindful of the incredible lies that are coming out there about massive, rampant voter fraud and the kinds of policies that they want to bring in the wake of those lies by generating a fear of the other stealing our elections.

EMERSON
Well these narratives about voter fraud and stealing of elections are obviously a central part of the public debate right now.

But what I noted about the two things that you said we should look out for -- namely, voting machines and maintenance of voter rolls -- are the types of things that traditionally a secretary of state or a board of elections would do sort of as an administrative clerical duty. These are not necessarily public functions, choosing new voting machines and figuring out whose name is outdated on the voter rolls.

So I think the work is clear in terms of making sure we not only keep an eye out for blatant lies and actions around election time, but these administrative tasks in terms of making machine purchases and and maintaining voter rolls is really where a lot of the real work is done.

CAROL
Absolutely. Absolutely.

EMERSON
Well, I wanted to close with the question, maybe stepping back a bit since it is the close of Black History Month.

How do you think history will remember this sort of post-Obama period in America? And maybe to complicate it a bit, do you think that will be different if there is another African-American president next?

CAROL
[32:07] In my book White Rage, which came out before the 2016 election, I signaled the rise of Donald Trump as the white rage response to Barack Obama. What Trump brought to the table was not real policy innovation. What he brought was pure, uncut white supremacy.

He preyed on the fears, and when you think about it, whites were the only racial or ethnic group in America who voted in the majority for Donald Trump. If an African-American is elected after him, that will not alter this narrative of white rage.

We need to understand the way that white supremacy and racism have shaped our discourse, shaped our policies, shaped our perceptions, to the point where it has put in power a man who is so thoroughly compromised on so many levels and so unqualified on so many levels. But he offered what no one else could. And remember he started, he launched his political career with birtherism, so history will remember that.

But what also history will take into account, I hope, is the recognition that he did not win the majority of votes, and that his popularity has never risen really above his base. And that there has been strong, consistent, and persistent resistance to his vision of America that is very Jim Crow, very whites-only.

[34:02] And not just whites only, but almost plantation-like, white elites only. And that where the trickle down happens supposedly are for poor whites, but they can't feel it because their water is being polluted, their air is being polluted as the regulations from EPA are being stripped away.

We're in a turbulent time right now. We're in a moment where we are fighting basically not only internally, but that kind of global move, that global anti-democracy move that is out there. But I think we have the strength and the will and the vision to restore or resurrect an America that is much more inclusive, much more healthy, and much more vibrant and much more committed to true democracy.

EMERSON
Professor Anderson, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.

CAROL
Oh, thank you so much.

EMERSON
Thanks very much for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast us and tweet @ACLU with feedback. We appreciate your input and will be sure to read every message. Till next week. Peace.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Racist Reality of Voter Suppression (ep. 35)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As Black History Month comes to an end, Professor Carol Anderson (Emory University) joins At Liberty to discuss ongoing voter suppression efforts in the United States, and as a bonus, she tells the story of how the NAACP helped lead the global struggle against colonialism in the 1940s and 1950s.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Why are Republicans so obsessed with voter fraud? Study after study finds no evidence of any large-scale voter fraud in the country, yet we keep hearing about necessary changes to voting systems in order to combat this major threat to democracy. Here's the thing - it's a sleight of hand trick, just the latest in a long history of racist voter suppression laws. By crying 'voter fraud', the government has been able to tap into policies based in white supremacy with the intent of curbing voter turnout, particularly among black voters. Carol Anderson follows her wildly popular book "White Rage" with "One Person, No Vote", detailing the sustained attacks on voting rights that we are watching unfold as we head into the midterm elections.

Email us at WITHpod@gmail.com

Tweet using #WITHpod

Read more at nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
voter suppression past and present with carol anderson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‎Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes: Voter Suppression Past and Present with Carol Anderson on Apple Podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
‎Why are Republicans so obsessed with voter fraud? Study after study finds no evidence of any large-scale voter fraud in the country, yet we keep hearing about necessary changes to voting systems in order to combat this major threat to democracy. Here's the thing - it's a sleight of hand trick, just...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This episode of Who Belongs? is another installment of our Civic Engagement Narrative Change project series, with project researcher Josh Clark interviewing two guests: The first is Robert Greenwald, an award-winning producer and director who has a new film coming out on September 25 called "Suppressed: The Fight to Vote," about voter suppression in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, and Carol Anderson, Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of the book One Person No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy.

Carol Anderson: Imagine you're the director of the lottery. You certified the machines. Then you say you pulled the winning lottery ticket for $1 billion. That is what Brian Kemp did in this election.

Marc Abizeid: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Who Belongs?, a podcast from the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. My name is Marc Abizeid, one of the hosts of Who Belongs? This episode will be another installment of our Civic Engagement Narrative Change project series, with project researcher Josh Clark interviewing two guests. The first is Robert Greenwald, an award-winning producer and director who has a new film coming out next week on September 25th, called Suppressed: The Fight to Vote, about voter suppression in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia. And Carol Anderson, professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and author of the book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. This was their conversation.

Josh Clark: Today we'll be talking about the film, Suppressed: The Fight to Vote. The film investigates the issues of voter suppression and voting rights, especially in the state of Georgia, and in relation to the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, but also, as we turn to the presidential election season of 2020. The film will premiere in Atlanta on September 24th, with full release on September 25th, and you'll be able to access it at www.fighttovote.org, that's, F-I-G-H-T-T-O-V-O-T-E, .org.

Josh Clark: So, Robert, you founded Brave New Films about 14 years ago, from what I understand. And you've directed documentaries on a wide range of topics. You've taken on Walmart's business and labor practices, the political influence of large media conglomerates, war profiteering in Iraq in the George W. Bush years, and also US drone policy under President Obama. What made Brave New Films decide that you all would devote yourselves to tackling the issue of voter suppression in Georgia?

Robert Greenwald: There were a couple of reasons that came together to lead to the decision to take on voting suppression. One of the first was the absolutely brilliant and essential book that Professor Anderson has written -- One Person, No Vote -- which really served as a guide throughout the whole process, in terms of the research, the explanation of how voting suppression works today. And it opened my eyes, and all of my colleagues eyes, to a fundamentally different idea. It's not one person under cover of night sneaking in and stealing a ballot box, or holding a gun to somebody. It's a whole series of different strategies and tactics -- unfortunately, many of them legal -- and the result is this widespread voter suppression. So, reading Professor Anderson's book, seeing and understanding the variety of the different tactics, and then, the amazing staff at Brave New Films -- Laurie, our associate producer, and, Casey, our producer -- began the months of research, in terms of finding the personal stories.

Robert Greenwald: What we do with Brave New Films and with film is, we put a face on policy, and if we don't have the faces, then many other folks can do the policy. But what we uniquely do is the faces, which are useful and important in film, and allow us to tell a systemic story. Not a story of one corrupt person, not a story of one broken voting booth, but a systemic effort to stop people from voting. So, all of that came together and led to the decision that there was nothing more important that we could do than to take on this issue to the best of our ability.

Josh Clark: Yes, Professor Anderson's book, One Person, No Vote, is really a definitive history of voter suppression in the US, as well as an analysis of some of the contemporary tactics of voter suppression, really an important book. And it's awesome to hear the impact that this book had, that it really drove this film into being, in a way.

Josh Clark: Professor Anderson, you speak in the film, in several parts of the film. And one really evocative statement that you had was that voter suppression today is like termites in the house. And I wanted to give you an opportunity to spell out that metaphor for us, and what you're meaning by that.

Carol Anderson: And I use that metaphor because, in so many ways, it looks like the house is standing, it looks like the house is solid. You walk in, there are walls, there's a floor, there's a roof. And you think, "Ah, I've got a nice solid home." And then, if you want to do some remodeling, you pull off the wall, and all of a sudden you're looking at the studs, and there's just sawdust, and you realize there's nothing really holding up your home. And soon, if you don't stop this massive destruction of the pillars of your home, it's going to collapse.

Carol Anderson: That's how I see where we are with democracy right now, is that it looks like it functions. We see candidates running. We have weekly and monthly polls telling us who's in front and who's behind. On election day, we have cameras there talking about people who are at the polls, and they're voting, and now we have the returns coming in. It all looks like a nice functioning democracy. But when you pull back the drywall, what you see are the ways that the policies of voter suppression are systematically destroying -- eating away -- at the very pillars holding up the house of democracy. That's why that analogy just really spoke to me.

Josh Clark: I wanted to mention, of course, that the gubernatorial race in Georgia in 2018 was one that many people were watching, that was historic for a number of different reasons, among others that the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, if she had been victorious, would have been the first African-American woman governor in the country. And also, because Stacey Abrams is someone who has done more than most, and arguably, in Georgia, more than any, to get folks registered, and to really go around and bring more people into the process than have been in the democratic process, and the electoral process, consistently, in the state, in large part through the organization, New Georgia Project, which she directed.

Josh Clark: So, I wanted to give that as background for any of our listeners that might not know that piece of context. But I also wanted to ask -- before we dig in further into some of the questions about particular tactics, and how they functioned in Georgia, and how they function across the country to suppress the vote -- if the two of you could just give a brief overview naming some of the voter suppression tactics that we saw in Georgia in 2018, and that the film, Suppressed, investigates.
Carol Anderson: We saw, for instance, massive voter roll purges. 10.6% of Georgia's voter rolls, registrants on Georgia's voter rolls, were knocked off the list in 2018 alone.

Robert Greenwald: We also saw poll closings. Hundreds of polls were closed, primarily in areas that vote heavily Democratic, and are primarily African-American communities. We have a gentleman who was in the military, and says this was about absentee ballots, and he said it was easier to vote absentee from Iraq than it was to vote absentee in the United States.

Carol Anderson: And we have the Exact Match program. So, what Georgia says is that, "It's easier to vote here than anywhere, because we've got this kind of automatic voter registration." What Georgia doesn't tell you -- it's like the asterisk that's right there -- is that if your voter registration card doesn't match up exactly to what's in the state's database, or the social security office's database, then your voter registration is held in limbo. And you don't quite know why there's a problem. It may be that there's a space between your last name, and it's not on the state's driver's license database. It may be that there is an accent, René, instead of Rene. You don't know. But what you do know, eventually, kind of, sort of, is that you registered to vote, but you're not registered to vote.

Robert Greenwald: Yes. And I think, just to reiterate that, I mean, as someone in the film talks about, this is particularly effective, if you will, because people assume once they're registered that they're registered, and that's not the case. The other tactic that got some attention, but fundamentally, how widespread it was, the long lines. Well, you say, "Long lines, what's the big deal?" So I want to ask everyone listening, "How long would you wait in line to vote?" We have people, again, primarily in African-American districts, where they waited in line an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours, and six hours. Which requires not only extraordinary patience, but also, in many cases, missing work. And now, to vote, it's costing you not just time, but it's costing you money. And as Dr. Anderson says, there's research about the longer the wait, the more people decide not to vote.

Carol Anderson: Yep. And key to that is making sure that there aren't enough voting machines in those minority precincts. And this is part of what led to those multi-hour lines. In fact, over a thousand voting machines were in a warehouse on election day, instead of being distributed as they should have been, to precincts that were in Fulton County, which is Atlanta, in Cobb County, another part of Atlanta, and Gwinnett County, yet another part of Atlanta.

Josh Clark: Yeah. This is really one of those issues that I feel like the media, I mean, not to paint all of the media as one thing, but media generally does us a disservice in their coverage of long lines. I mean, usually their reporting when there are long lines on election days is, "Look, this is a positive sign. High turnout." I feel like I remember, really, even since I was a kid, this media narrative of, "Look, democracy is alive and well. Just look at these lines, people standing in line waiting to vote, everyone's here." But that really is putting a sheen on what's an administrative failure, isn't it Dr. Anderson?

Carol Anderson: Oh, absolutely. What the research is very clear on is that African-Americans in African-American districts, and Hispanics in primarily-Hispanic districts, have to wait the longest to vote. The group that has the shortest wait time at the polls are whites who live in white districts. And so, you get this disparate impact, and it has a horrific effect on voter turnout, not only at the day of the the polls when you're standing in line. Imagine standing in line five to six hours. We don't like to wait 30 minutes at the driver's license bureau.

Josh Clark: Yeah. Right.

Carol Anderson: So imagine ... Right? And so, what happens here is that you're in line for six hours, and for many, those are in working class districts where you have to punch a clock. And if you can't punch that clock because you're standing in line trying to vote because there are three machines there, instead of the 15 or 20 that should be there, or that they forgot to bring the electric cords, or the batteries ran down, all of these excuses, that are massive administrative failures, that are designed to create these long lines, which are therefore designed to discourage voters in those districts from standing in line for five, six hours to cast their ballot. This is, again, the analogy of the termites, right? It looks like it's functioning. It's not.

Josh Clark: Yes. Yeah-

Robert Greenwald: I would also add to that: I look at it, in fact, not as an administrative failure, but, perhaps, sadly, an administrative success, in terms of achieving a goal of voter suppression. Someone in the film talks about resource allocation, which is, you decide where you put your resources. That's not an accident. That's not a mistake. That is working to make sure some get more of a right to vote than others.

Josh Clark: ... Robert, you talked earlier about putting faces on a system, right? And this type of story of voter suppression, and all the stories that are really compelling in the film that you've made, they're not usually well-told, post-election. They're not picked up for a variety of reasons. I assume media move on to covering winners and losers, a lot of profiles of swing voters, and so forth. I wonder if you would say, since you have gone through this process as a filmmaker, is it difficult to find people impacted by suppressive laws and policies? I feel like that's an excuse that you might hear for why journalists don't do a better job of covering this. But, did you find it difficult in the making of this film to get folks in the room to hear their stories?

Robert Greenwald: In this case, with the widespread suppression in Georgia, we did not find it difficult. What it did require was time and effort. And, again, I tend to look at things in terms of the system. Many wonderful journalists who I know, and some, many, who I don't know, I think would love to have the time to be able to spend as we did. Look, we're a very small nonprofit, but Laurie spent probably months and months just reaching out, talking to people, posting on social networks, following up leads. Others could have done it, but they didn't, often because of the nature of their jobs, which are in a for-profit system, they have to turn around quicker what can be a profit. But the number of stories that were out there, I mean, it was really extraordinary. And there are a whole series of lawsuits being pursued now. And then those lawsuits, they have all numbers of people with different statements about how their vote was suppressed.

Josh Clark: Something that struck me about the stories -- the impacted voters that you did find, the ones featured in the film Suppressed -- was that, by and large, they were highly-engaged politically. So, a lot of folks who were informed, committed. And we hear their stories of jumping through every hoop, going over all of the obstacles that are put in their way, and still not getting to vote. And that's a powerful bit of the film, because you get so frustrated hearing these stories, and going along on these journeys with folks. But I think that why most people underestimate the impact of voter suppression is that it's usually more subtle, as Professor Anderson was discussing, and a lot of voters can manage maybe one or two of these kinds of inconveniences, and not five or six. And then, they don't vote, and then, we don't end up being able to hear about it. As a voter suppression expert, would you say that that's generally the case, Professor Anderson?

Carol Anderson: I would say it is. And the reason it is, is ... and as a historian, I'm going to take us back to Mississippi in 1890. When Mississippi developed the Mississippi Plan, which was to figure out, "How do we stop black people from voting, and get around the 15th Amendment, the constitutional amendment on the right to vote. How do we do that?" And they developed an array of policies: poll tax, literacy test, good-character clause, et cetera. What they realized is that if one of those programs doesn't stop, the second one might it. If the second one doesn't, the third one might. If the third one doesn't, the fourth one might. If the fourth one doesn't, the fifth one might. So by 1940, that combination of what was called the Mississippi Plan led to only 3 percent of African-Americans being registered to vote in the South.

Carol Anderson: But the images that we have of that are the images of the violence. So, there are the policies, but then there's that election day terrorism, that kind of terrorism that led to the explosion on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, that led to the Voting Rights Act. That's how we think of voter suppression -- the violence. So, what happens if you strip the violence out, but you maintain and create an array of policies that are so effective in picking off 1,000 here, 20 there, 30 there, 100 there. That's what we have right now. It's quiet, it's subtle, it's methodical, it's bureaucratic, and it's effective. And it's really hard for a nation and a media -- drawn to the bloodshed, drawn to the fire, drawn to the explosions -- to really gather how corrosive and dangerous these policies really are, to be able to explain them legibly. That's why I love the film.

Josh Clark: I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah. I mean, what's so frustrating, I feel like is, I think there is this ... it's partially due to a faith in our electoral system, and in our democracy, that folks who aren't subject to voter suppression tactics, to having all of these different hoops that they have to jump through, when they hear these cases, they deny that this could be widespread. "Those are tiny exceptions," is what they say. And I think that when those stories do get told in the media, or in a film like Suppressed, yeah, those stories that are told are exceptional, but not in the way that people are saying that. They're exceptional because these are folks who did jump through every hoop, and they're really the tip of the iceberg.

Carol Anderson: One of the narratives out there deals with how ... it was one of the reasons I wrote One Person, No Vote, was after the 2016 election, there was the narrative that black people just didn't show up. And so, it was built into that narrative of what I call black pathology. "They don't care about democracy, they just didn't show up." And it doesn't say that that was the first election in 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. And so, this narrative of, "Well, this vote, voting is out there for everybody. Everybody has an ID. I go vote, and I don't stand in line. I don't understand the problem. If you really cared, you would go vote."

Carol Anderson: And so, residential segregation allows to draw the districts in such a way so that many in the middle class norm, and many whites, don't feel the full impact of having to stand in line for six hours, or having to get an ID where you don't have all of the documentation, so you have to go back multiple times to try to gather up all of the documents to prove you are who you are. So, that is the subtle corrosive way that it shapes our electorate. It shapes our sense of, "Everybody can do this. This is a fair and equal society," when it in fact is not.

Josh Clark: Another example, I feel like, that goes along with the general point you're making of a policy that, on its face, average voter who's not exposed to voter suppression might not think sounds very pernicious, is the Exact Match policy. And I wanted to ask for you to spell out, why is it that this has a disparate impact, undeniably, on communities of color?

Carol Anderson: And the way that it works, so, Exact Match says that everything that you have, particularly like your name, that you put on your voter registration has to be exactly that that's in the state's driver's license database, or the Social Security Administration's database. What a lawsuit proved was that what that does is it privileges Anglicised names. John Smith. If your name is Jose Garcia Marquez, and you write it on your voter registration card with a hyphen between Garcia and Marquez, but there's not a hyphen on your driver's license in the driver's license database, then, boom, kicked out. You're put in electoral limbo.

Carol Anderson: What we know from the ways that names work is that when you don't have an Anglicised name, it's going to be a lot easier to have that name kicked out. If you have an uncommon spelling of the name, that name is going to be kicked out. Those sorts of things happen so that in October of 2018 -- so this is just a month before the election -- Brian Kemp, who was the Republican candidate for governor, who also stayed on as secretary of state at the time to manage this election, he held in abeyance 53,000 voter registrations in October of 2018, because of Exact Match. 70% of those withheld, put in limbo, were African-American. That's how this works.

Josh Clark: In the film, I hope I'm not giving anything away by referencing this one particular incident, but there's a case of this gentleman whose last name is Del Rio. And either on the voter roll record, or on the ID, Del and Rio have a space between them, and on the other one there's no space. And so he gets held up, gets told that he's not in the voter rolls, and has Exact Match explained to him. But something that was so interesting about this case was that he actually ends up getting to vote, and you learn that this is a person ... I'm almost sure he's a professor, definitely highly educated.

Carol Anderson: Yes, he is.

Josh Clark: Yeah. Very educated, confident to speak back to the poll workers, right? And say "No, I have every right to vote," et cetera. And they end up saying, "Okay, we'll let you vote." And this is one of those things that's between the lines in the film, what you're seeing, though, is administrative discretion, and how that functions to privilege some, and and exclude others, as well. Do you feel like that plays a big role, Professor Anderson, administrative discretion, and how the folks who are actually there at the tables with the rolls are making calls in the moment? Or is that one of those exceptional incidents?

Carol Anderson: No, it's not exceptional, and, in many ways, it is traditional. When you look over the history of disfranchisement in America. There was massive authority for administrative discretion for the poll workers. So when it was the poll tax, if it was somebody they wanted to vote, then fine, they could vote. If it was somebody they didn't want to vote, they would stop them. Here what you saw was Professor Del Rio -- actually he is a physician and a professor, at Emory -- able to use his authority in ways that someone who punches a clock may not be able to, to say, "Yes, I will vote."

Carol Anderson: So, you see embedded in voter suppression issues of race and class. And also, with the voter ID, gender. Because women who marry or who divorce are often stopped from getting the the ID because there's a mismatch. So, all of these things are embedded in there, and it's a way, again, to begin to curtail the electorate, to shape it in such a way, to basically give the aura of democracy, to give the aura of one person, one vote, when that is not what is going on, on the ground, at all.

Josh Clark: That point about discriminatory impact on women of Exact Match is so important. And, honestly, it's one that I haven't heard articulated before. Stacey Abrams, who I mentioned earlier, who is the gubernatorial candidate in Georgia is included in the film. There's a clip from an interview with Stacey Abrams. Robert, I wondered if your team approached Brian Kemp, who as Professor Anderson mentioned, well, is now the sitting governor of Georgia, and who presided over his election in his capacity as secretary of state. Did you reach out for the film?

Robert Greenwald: We reached out multiple times to Kemp's office and did not receive an answer. We called, we emailed, we wrote letters, and there was no answer. And, of course, I mean, think about it -- if you were both the referee and the contestant, you would not want a lot of attention called to that fact alone of the dual role. And he played a dual role. And the fact that he did it, that he was able to work voter suppression so that he got the election, I think is both outrageous, infuriating, and we hope, with the film, will be a wake up call to other states all around the country, where efforts are going on. Now, the good news is, in some states, the people who believe, "Hey, if you want to vote, you should be able to vote," are winning.

Robert Greenwald: I mean, hard to imagine we'd have to fight that battle after all these years. But the film is a call, and it's a call, a wake up call, a call to action. And the good news is that it's available for free at fighttovote.org. So anybody can screen it, anybody we have, it's going to be seen in thousands of schools, in houses of worship, in libraries, in bookstores, in any place, at your homes. So that I hope all the work that the team has put into it, that Dr. Anderson's put into this issue, will have a real impact on people around a fundamental issue of democracy, which is voting.

Josh Clark: Yeah, I mean, the film is incredibly powerful, and, really, I felt even if you weren't sure what you thought about the role of voter suppression in Georgia's 2018 election before watching Suppressed, you almost can't walk away from the film thinking that Brian Kemp is anything other than the illegitimate governor of Georgia, that he shouldn't be there.

Carol Anderson: I think one of the things that I'd like to say is to understand Brian Kemp's role, because many people don't get what a secretary of state does, is to imagine you're the director of the lottery. You certified the machines. Then you say you pulled the winning lottery ticket for $1 billion. That is what Brian Kemp did in this election. A lottery director who pulls the winning lottery ticket.

Josh Clark: Who would you say, "It's most important that this group of people sees this film"?

Robert Greenwald: It's a large group of people, and I think maybe the most important will be people whose vote is, in fact, being suppressed. People who've been subjected to harassment, suppression, difficulties, closing polling places, waiting in line, perfect matches, absentee voting, provisional ballots, it goes on and on. It's those people who I hope will see it, and the film will serve to stiffen their resolve, to further activate them. And, as we say at the end of the film, if you're right to vote wasn't so important, they wouldn't try to stop you from using it. So those are the first line, if you will. And then it's everyone else who can do something, whether you screen it at your school, or at your house of worship, or at very own home. Nobody can sit on the sidelines here. And I hope the film will motivate people to say, "Yes, I can do something, and I will do something."

Josh Clark: Well, thank you so much, Robert Greenwald, from Brave New Films, and thank you, Professor Carol Anderson, from Emory University, for speaking with us today. This has been really great. I just want to say, once again, that the release date for Suppressed: The Fight to Vote is September 25th, and you'll be able to access it for free, as Robert mentioned, at www.fighttovote.org. And thank you both very much for your work on this important issue.

Robert Greenwald: Thank you.

Carol Anderson: Thank you so much for having us.

Robert Greenwald: Thank you.

Marc Abizeid: And that concludes this episode of Who Belongs?, with Joshua Clark, a researcher from the Haas Institute Civic Engagement Narrative Change project, interviewing filmmaker Robert Greenwald about his new documentary coming out next week, called, Suppressed: The Fight to Vote, and Carol Anderson, professor of African-American studies at Emory University, who is the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. To access a transcript of this interview, and for more episodes of Who Belongs?, visit us online at haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/whobelongs. Thank you for listening.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Podcast: Voter Suppression in Georgia, with Robert Greenwald and Carol Anderson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This episode of Who Belongs? is another installment of our Civic Engagement Narrative Change project series, with project researcher Josh Clark interviewing two guests: The first is Robert Greenwald, an award-winning producer and director who has a new film coming out on September 25 called "Suppressed: The Fight to Vote," about voter suppression in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, and Carol Anderson, Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of the book One Person No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook (Full Film)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reconstruction: America After the Civil War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents a vital new four-hour documentary series on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
America By The Numbers
Season 2 Episode 1 | 56m 35s

Learn how Asian American, Black Millennial, Arab American and Latino Evangelical voters are exerting their growing strength and influence in this 2016 election special about power and politics, demographics and democracy. Watch AMERICA BY THE NUMBERS' special program "The New Deciders" September 6, 2016 at 10/9C on PBS.

Aired: 09/06/16

Rating: NR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The New Deciders | Season 2 Episode 1 | America By The Numbers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
America By The Numbers Season 2 Episode 1 | 56m 35s Learn how Asian American, Black Millennial, Arab American and Latino Evangelical voters are exerting their growing strength and influence in this 2016 election special about power and politics, demographics and democracy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Nonfiction

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015
An NPR Best Book of 2015

Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.

In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.

Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Nonfiction

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015
An NPR Best Book of 2015

Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.

In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.

Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, NonfictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2015A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015An NPR Best Book of 2015Countless books have been written about the civil rights...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An award-winning constitutional law historian examines case-based evidence of the court's longstanding support for white supremacy (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that bias has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal government.
One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today.

Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and what seemed to be the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so a half million African Americans across the South who had risked their lives and property to be allowed to cast ballots were stricken from voting rolls by white supremacists. This vacuum allowed for the rise of Jim Crow. None of this was done in the shadows-those determined to wrest the vote from black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution.

On Account of Race tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away. It is a warning that the right to vote is fragile and must be carefully guarded and actively preserved lest American democracy perish.

An award-winning constitutional law historian examines case-based evidence of the court's longstanding support for white supremacy (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that bias has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal government.
One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today.

Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and what seemed to be the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so a half million African Americans across the South who had risked their lives and property to be allowed to cast ballots were stricken from voting rolls by white supremacists. This vacuum allowed for the rise of Jim Crow. None of this was done in the shadows-those determined to wrest the vote from black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution.

On Account of Race tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away. It is a warning that the right to vote is fragile and must be carefully guarded and actively preserved lest American democracy perish.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An award-winning constitutional law historian examines case-based evidence of the court's longstanding support for white supremacy (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that bias has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal gov...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A breakout media and political analyst delivers a sweeping snapshot of American Democracy and the role that African Americans have played in its shaping while offering concrete information to help harness the electoral power of the country's rising majority and exposing political forces aligned to subvert and suppress Black voters.
Black voters were critical to the Democrats' 2018 blue wave. In fact, 90 percent of Black voters supported Democratic House candidates, compared to just 53 percent of all voters. Despite media narratives, this was not a fluke. Throughout U.S. history, Black people have played a crucial role in the shaping of the American experiment. Yet still, this powerful voting bloc is often dismissed as some "amorphous" deviation, argues Tiffany Cross.

Say It Loud! is her explosive examination of how America's composition was designed to exclude Black voters, but paradoxically would likely cease to exist without them. With multiple tentacles stretching into the cable news echo chamber, campaign leadership, and Black voter data, Cross creates a wrinkle in time with a reflective look at the timeless efforts endlessly attempting to deny people of color the right to vote-a basic tenet of American democracy.

And yet as the demographics of the country are changing, so too is the electoral power construct-by evolution and by force, Cross declares. Grounded in the most-up-to-date research, Say It Loud! is a vital tool for a wide swath of constituencies.

A breakout media and political analyst delivers a sweeping snapshot of American Democracy and the role that African Americans have played in its shaping while offering concrete information to help harness the electoral power of the country's rising majority and exposing political forces aligned to subvert and suppress Black voters.
Black voters were critical to the Democrats' 2018 blue wave. In fact, 90 percent of Black voters supported Democratic House candidates, compared to just 53 percent of all voters. Despite media narratives, this was not a fluke. Throughout U.S. history, Black people have played a crucial role in the shaping of the American experiment. Yet still, this powerful voting bloc is often dismissed as some "amorphous" deviation, argues Tiffany Cross.

Say It Loud! is her explosive examination of how America's composition was designed to exclude Black voters, but paradoxically would likely cease to exist without them. With multiple tentacles stretching into the cable news echo chamber, campaign leadership, and Black voter data, Cross creates a wrinkle in time with a reflective look at the timeless efforts endlessly attempting to deny people of color the right to vote-a basic tenet of American democracy.

And yet as the demographics of the country are changing, so too is the electoral power construct-by evolution and by force, Cross declares. Grounded in the most-up-to-date research, Say It Loud! is a vital tool for a wide swath of constituencies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A breakout media and political analyst delivers a sweeping snapshot of American Democracy and the role that African Americans have played in its shaping while offering concrete information to help harness the electoral power of the country's rising majority and exposing political forces aligned to s...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Voting Rights War tells the story of the courageous struggle to achieve voting equality through more than one hundred years of work by the NAACP at the Supreme Court. Readers take the journey for voting rights from slavery to the Plessy v. Ferguson case that legalized segregation in 1896 through...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An incisive reflection on black electoral politics, disenfranchisement, and the lasting legacy of the civil rights movement-now with a brand-new essay on the Covid-19 pandemic, reparations, and the 2020 George Floyd protests.
Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney's meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the election of the first black president.
Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney's own memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the reactions of his parents to the changes taking place in American society. He concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote, with particular attention to the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Also included here is Pinckney's essay "What Black Means Now," on the history of the black middle class, stereotypes about blacks and crime, and contemporary debates about "post-blackness," as well as a new essay, "Buck Moon in Harlem," which reflects on Juneteenth and the ongoing fight for racial justice, and offers a glimpse of New York City amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

An incisive reflection on black electoral politics, disenfranchisement, and the lasting legacy of the civil rights movement-now with a brand-new essay on the Covid-19 pandemic, reparations, and the 2020 George Floyd protests.
Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney's meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the election of the first black president.
Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney's own memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the reactions of his parents to the changes taking place in American society. He concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote, with particular attention to the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Also included here is Pinckney's essay "What Black Means Now," on the history of the black middle class, stereotypes about blacks and crime, and contemporary debates about "post-blackness," as well as a new essay, "Buck Moon in Harlem," which reflects on Juneteenth and the ongoing fight for racial justice, and offers a glimpse of New York City amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An incisive reflection on black electoral politics, disenfranchisement, and the lasting legacy of the civil rights movement-now with a brand-new essay on the Covid-19 pandemic, reparations, and the 2020 George Floyd protests.Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney’s meditation on a century and a ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Historians have long been engaged in telling the story of the struggle for the vote. In the wake of recent contested elections, the suppression of the vote has returned to the headlines, as awareness of the deep structural barriers to the ballot, particularly for poor, black, and Latino voters, has called attention to the historical roots of issues related to voting access.
Perhaps most notably, former state legislator Stacey Abrams's campaign for Georgia's gubernatorial race drew national attention after she narrowly lost to then-secretary of state Brian Kemp, who had removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the official rolls. After her loss, Abrams created Fair Fight, a multimillion-dollar initiative to combat voter suppression in twenty states.
At an annual conference of the Organization of American Historians, leading scholars Carol Anderson, Kevin M. Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson, and Heather Anne Thompson had a conversation with Abrams about the long history of voter suppression at the Library Company of Philadelphia. This book is a transcript of that extraordinary conversation, edited by Jim Downs.
Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections offers an enlightening, history-informed conversation about voter disenfranchisement in the United States. By gathering scholars and activists whose work has provided sharp analyses of this issue, we see how historians in general explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public.
The book also includes a "top ten" selection of essays and articles by such writers as journalist Ari Berman, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight, and civil rights icon John Lewis.

Historians have long been engaged in telling the story of the struggle for the vote. In the wake of recent contested elections, the suppression of the vote has returned to the headlines, as awareness of the deep structural barriers to the ballot, particularly for poor, black, and Latino voters, has called attention to the historical roots of issues related to voting access.
Perhaps most notably, former state legislator Stacey Abrams's campaign for Georgia's gubernatorial race drew national attention after she narrowly lost to then-secretary of state Brian Kemp, who had removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the official rolls. After her loss, Abrams created Fair Fight, a multimillion-dollar initiative to combat voter suppression in twenty states.
At an annual conference of the Organization of American Historians, leading scholars Carol Anderson, Kevin M. Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson, and Heather Anne Thompson had a conversation with Abrams about the long history of voter suppression at the Library Company of Philadelphia. This book is a transcript of that extraordinary conversation, edited by Jim Downs.
Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections offers an enlightening, history-informed conversation about voter disenfranchisement in the United States. By gathering scholars and activists whose work has provided sharp analyses of this issue, we see how historians in general explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public.
The book also includes a "top ten" selection of essays and articles by such writers as journalist Ari Berman, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight, and civil rights icon John Lewis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Historians have long been engaged in telling the story of the struggle for the vote. In the wake of recent contested elections, the suppression of the vote has returned to the headlines, as awareness of the deep structural barriers to the ballot, particularly for poor, black, and Latino voters, has ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Politics of Voter Suppression arrives in time to assess actual practices at the polls this fall and to reengage with debates about voter suppression tactics such as requiring specific forms of identification. Tova Andrea Wang examines the history of how U.S. election reforms have been manipulate...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to main content

It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Subject Guides: Anti-Racism Research & Resource Guide: Politics & Voter Suppression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skip to main content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Black Americans still face disproportionate barriers to the ballot box in 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Black Americans see disparities in staying on the voter rolls, being able to successfully vote in-person, and having their mail-in ballots counted.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Voting should be as easy and accessible as possible, and in many cases it is. But in recent years, more than 400 anti-voter bills have been introduced in 48 states. These bills erect unnecessary barriers for people to register to vote, vote by mail, or vote in person. The result is a severely compromised democracy that doesn't reflect the will of the people. Our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard.

Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like strict voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. These measures disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote.

Below, we've listed some of the most rampant methods of voter suppression across the country - and the advocacy and litigation efforts aimed at protecting our fundamental right to vote.

Voter Registration Restrictions

Restricting the terms and requirements of registration is one of the most common forms of voter suppression. Restrictions can include requiring documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous obstacles for voter registration drives, or limiting the window of time in which voters can register.

Politicians often use unfounded claims of voter fraud to try to justify registration restrictions. In 2011, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach championed a law requiring Kansans to show "proof of citizenship" documents in order to register to vote, citing false claims of noncitizen voting. Most people don't carry the required documents on hand - like a passport, or a birth certificate - and as a result, the law blocked the registrations of more than 30,000 Kansans. The ACLU sued and defeated the law in 2018. In 2020, the Supreme Court and a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.

After a surge in registrations during the 2018 midterm election, Tennessee legislators imposed substantial requirements on groups that foster political participation via voter registration efforts and created criminal and civil penalties against those who fail to comply with these onerous requirements and turn in "incomplete" applications. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law and blocked it from going into effect in 2019.

Resources on voter registration requirements
Look up your state's voter registration requirements | States with online voter registration

Criminalization of the Ballot Box

Some states are discouraging voter participation by imposing arbitrary requirements and harsh penalties on voters and poll workers who violate these rules. In Georgia, lawmakers have made it a crime to provide food and water to voters standing in line at the polls - lines that are notoriously long in Georgia, especially for communities of color. In Texas, people have been arrested and given outrageous sentences for what amount at most to innocent mistakes made during the voting process. ACLU clients Crystal Mason and Hervis Rogers are examples of this egregious treatment.

Because of racism in law enforcement and the broader criminal legal system, criminalization of the ballot box disproportionately impacts people of color, who are more likely to be penalized. This method of voter suppression aims to instill fear in communities of color and suppress their voices in the democratic process.
More on criminalization of the ballot box

Felony Disenfranchisement

A felony conviction can come with drastic consequences, including the loss of your right to vote. Some states ban voting only during incarceration, or while on probation or parole. And other states and jurisdictions, like Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., don't disenfranchise people with felony convictions at all. The fact that these laws vary so dramatically only adds to the overall confusion that voters face, which is a form of voter suppression in itself.

Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect Black and Brown people, who often face harsher sentences than white people for the same offenses. Many of these laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era, when legislators tried to block Black Americans' newly won right to vote by enforcing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers that were nearly impossible to meet. To this day, the states with the most extreme disenfranchisement laws also have long histories of suppressing the rights of Black people.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls, including seven states with strict photo ID laws.

Cleaning up voter rolls can be a responsible part of election administration because many people move, die, or become ineligible to vote for other reasons. But sometimes, states use this process as a method of mass disenfranchisement, purging eligible voters from rolls for illegitimate reasons or based on inaccurate data, and often without adequate notice to the voters. A single purge can stop up to hundreds of thousands of people from voting. Often, voters only learn they've been erroneously purged when they show up at the polls on Election Day and it's too late to correct the error.

Election administrators properly keep voter rolls up to date by filtering out voters who have changed their address, died, or otherwise become ineligible to vote. But states often conduct such purges using inaccurate data, flawed processes, and targeting certain voters such as those with felony convictions without enforcing federally-mandated safeguards to prevent purging voters who don't even fall under the targeted group.

The ACLU has taken action against unlawful voter purges and laws that enable them. In 2019, we stopped Texas' flawed, discriminatory voter purge list that targeted naturalized citizens. This year, we blocked an Indiana law that would have allowed county elections officials to kick voters off the rolls immediately without their explicit consent or notice, or an opportunity to correct the record.

More on voter purges
Report: Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote | Congressional Testimony by Sophia Lin Lakin, Deputy Director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project

Redistricting and Gerrymandering

Every 10 years, states redraw district lines based on population data gathered in the census. Legislators use these district lines to allocate representation in Congress and state legislatures. When redistricting is conducted properly, district lines are redrawn to reflect population changes and racial diversity. But too often, states use redistricting as a political tool to manipulate the outcome of elections. That's called gerrymandering - a widespread, undemocratic practice that's stifling the voices of millions of voters.

The Census Bureau released data from the 2020 Census in August 2021, triggering this once-in-a-decade line drawing process in most states. These new district lines will determine our political voice for the next decade.

The 2020 Census

In 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, with the goal of suppressing participation of immigrant communities, stunting their growing political influence. The question would have resulted in an undercount that goes against the census' very purpose - to count everybody in this country. Accurate population data is essential in apportioning representation and public funds. The ACLU sued the administration and successfully blocked the citizenship question before the census was conducted.

The Trump Administration's Census Cover-up

Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws, under which voters must present one of a limited set of forms of government-issued photo ID in order to cast a regular ballot - no exceptions. These strict ID laws are part of an ongoing strategy to suppress the vote.

Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have qualifying government-issued photo identification, and these individuals are disproportionately voters of color. That's because ID cards aren't always accessible for everyone. The ID itself can be costly, and even when IDs are free, applicants must incur other expenses to obtain the underlying documents that are needed to get an ID. This can be a significant burden on people in lower-income communities. Further, the travel required to obtain an ID is an obstacle for people with disabilities, the elderly, and people living in rural areas.

Voter ID Restrictions Imposed Since 2010

Who's Affected By Voter Suppression?

The short answer is all of us. Our democracy is debased when the vote is not accessible for all. But the fact is that some groups are disproportionately affected by voter suppression tactics, including people of color, young people, the elderly, and people with disabilities. The proof is in the numbers.

Across the country, 1 in 16 Black Americans cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.

Counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter.

In 2018, Latinx and Black Americans were twice as likely as whites to be unable to get off work while polls were open.

25 percent of voting-age Black Americans do not have a government-issued photo ID.

Geographic isolation is a major barrier to Native American voters due to the inaccessibility of nearby polling locations in many reservations. In South Dakota, 32 percent of Native voters cite travel distance as a factor in deciding whether to vote.

More than one-sixth (18 percent) of voters with disabilities reported difficulties voting in person in 2020.

Nearly two-thirds of polling places had at least one impediment for people with disabilities.

The right to vote is the most fundamental constitutional right for good reason: democracy cannot exist without the electoral participation of citizens. We vote because it's we, the people, who are supposed to shape our government. Not the other way around.

President Biden and states can enact measures to encourage rather than suppress voting. Automatic, online, and same-day voter registration encourage participation and reduce chances of error. Early voting helps people with travel or accessibility concerns participate. And states must enforce the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

At an individual level, the best way to fight voter suppression is to know your rights - and vote.

Tell Congress to pass the VRAA, which would reinstate critical protections against voter suppression left behind after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This is even more urgent in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which significantly undercut the protections of another vital provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Know Your Rights before you get to the polling booth. Read and share our guide on what to do if you face registration issues, need disability or language accommodations, or come across someone who's interfering with your right to vote. Share the guide on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Block the Vote: How Politicians are Trying to Block Voters from the Ballot Box | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Voting should be as easy and accessible as possible, and in many cases it is. But in recent years, more than 400 anti-voter bills have been introduced in 48 states. These bills erect unnecessary barriers for people to register to vote, vote by mail, or vote in person.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Days after Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama Good luck, Dan Bongino! Michelle Obama jokes about quarantine conditions: 'I'm tired of my husband' Are Democrats really serious about passing a DREAM Act in 2021? MORE won the 2008 election, his incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel delivered one of the most potent lines of the Great Recession, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before." The Obama administration then went on to make history with an aggressive legislative agenda , including passage of near-universal health coverage, a goal elusive to American presidents since Teddy Roosevelt.

Now we're witnessing how the Emanuel axiom is on the verge of a pernicious twist. With a nation in the midst of an epic and unprecedented upheaval, the black vote could be under threat of suppression.

Voter ID laws, the purging of millions of voters and other efforts designed to "combat" phantom voting fraud have already severely restricted voting rights for black and brown voters in southern and some western and midwestern states. Now, after what appeared to be willful neglect of the virus itself, we are about to experience willful obstruction of efforts to stop its effect on the democratic process.

The Wisconsin legislature last month tried to use the pandemic to keep turnout low throughout the state, hoping it would give them an edge in the election of its justices. Fortunately, that move backfired (though not without significant burden to the voters who had to turn out mid-pandemic at few available polling places) and the progressive judge won decisively . But the legislature's intent was clear and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld them. There's no guarantee we won't see it happen again this fall.

Whether the pandemic is in ebb or flow in November, Election Day won't be moved; even President Trump Donald Trump Good luck, Dan Bongino! The Hill's Morning Report - Biden's next act: Massive infrastructure plan with tax hikes Conservative group says polling shows Dems' voting rights bill 'out of sync with American voters' MORE can't change the date . But if the virus is flowing, will anyone come out to vote? The current phase of the pandemic is hitting black and Latino voters harder , some of whom are forced to work in jobs that make it almost impossible to physically distance and protect themselves.

At least for now, nationwide mail-in voting and other interventions to ensure universal voting are being met with a thud by the White House and Congressional Republicans.

President Trump even the quiet part out loud at the end of March, "They had things, levels of voting in the third virus response bill that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."

If we want to prevent what right now appears to be the Republican game plan - quashing mail-in voting and other efforts to keep black turnout high - we have to radically reinvent the way we turn out the black vote.

It starts with ending the traditional turnstile approach to the black vote: a big October push in beauty shops, churches and canvassing door to door. That's out the window. We have to start right now to guarantee black folks' access to the ballot. That means aggressive action from elected officials and on-the-ground (or virtual) organizers shifting strategies to combat the disruption that Republicans are sure to inject into the mix.

First, we have to zero in on mail-in voting. Right now, 29 states plus Washington, D.C. offer no-excuse absentee ballots and use vote by mail as the only way to vote. We need to raise that number to 50, ideally mandated in the next COVID-19 response legislation. If that effort fails, every single progressive and, in fact, pro-democracy organization in America needs to be part of the mail-in movement, working with governors, secretaries of state and Congressional leaders to cajole or mandate it. This may be the most important step we can take.

We need look no further than the Wisconsin primary where vote by mail led to the defeat of the incumbent Republican judge, who was assumed to be safe.

Next, we have to shift to digital organizing for registration and assistance with voting, by mail or however it can be done. This step is particularly important, as aggressive purging of voter rolls in the past two years has put us even further behind going into 2020. One innovative step would be to enlist young people, many of whom have a suddenly unscheduled summer, to lead the effort.

Finally, we need to include COVID-19 in our electoral messaging about why voting is critical for people of color, this year in particular. It is our democratic responsibility to use the ballot box to make our voices heard on what has been an abject failure of leadership on an epidemic that is disproportionately affecting black America.

These steps would ensure the integrity of our democracy, even in the midst of one of the greatest crises our nation has ever faced. Republicans are already gearing up to frame them instead as a plot of the left-wing and the "deep state," even with President Trump's confession that mail-in elections are truly about making sure every American can vote.

Our nation is already facing tens of thousands dead and a long, deep recession, all of which will hit black America the hardest. Let's not top it off with a death blow to black participation in our democracy.

Quentin James is a true visionary and proponent for community empowerment. He is the founder of The Collective PAC, a political action committee focused on building black political power by electing black candidates on the local, state and federal level. Quentin is also the co-founder of Inclusv, a diversity hiring initiative that places talented staffers of color into campaigns and advocacy organizations throughout the nation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Protecting the black vote from suppression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Days after Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama Good luck, Dan Bongino! Michelle Obama jokes about quarantine conditions: 'I'm tired of my husband' Are Democrats really serious about passing a DREAM Act in 2021? MORE won the 2008 election, his incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel delivered one of the most potent lines of the Great Recession, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Read: The Republicans telling voters to ignore Trump
The widespread failures during the primary elections foreshadow a potentially disastrous November election. States such as New York have been racing to make accommodations for voting by mail. But other states are making voting more difficult for residents: Oklahoma is fighting to keep its law requiring that absentee ballots be notarized; Texas will not accept medical vulnerability to the coronavirus as sufficient grounds for absentee voting. Even though greater access to the vote might help a sizable number of Donald Trump's voters, this opposition to it comes from the top. "Mail ballots, they cheat," the president has said.

The barriers to ballot access were unacceptable before the pandemic, Leah Aden, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who is actively litigating several voting-rights cases, told me. Black voters, on average, wait 45 percent longer to vote than white voters; Latino voters wait 46 percent longer.* One study, from the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, found that black and Latino voters in Florida were more than two times as likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected as white voters-because of a mix of voter error and how the state processes ballots. To leave that already flawed system unchanged in a pandemic is injurious, Aden said. "The failure to operate in the context that we're in, which is a pandemic, and proactively use your resources to address the emergence of that: That is also a form of voter suppression."

Several states, such as Georgia, Virginia, and Massachusetts, have reported record turnout for their primary elections, and will probably see double to triple that in the general. "It's likely that we're not going to fix these problems by November," Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who studies elections, told me. "In some cases, there really aren't any good solutions."
Read: Fighting for the right to vote in a tiny Texas county
More polling places will not magically appear. The average poll worker is more than 60 years old-and therefore vulnerable to COVID-19. In Wisconsin, roughly 7,000 poll workers said they would not work during the April election because of their fears of the coronavirus. Voters had to scramble to find new polling places, and figure out ways to get to them. The result? Long lines and a spike in absentee voting.

"Habituation is one of the things that makes people vote," Henry Brady, who studies electoral politics at UC Berkeley, told me. Some people are encouraged to vote because it's easy enough to do. In 2011, Brady and a team of researchers examined how changing polling places could affect the outcome of an election-and they found that alternating a location may have reduced voting by as much as 2 percent. Some people voted absentee instead of in person when their polling place was changed-but the study examined California, where an excuse is not required for absentee voting. "You're probably going to lose a lot more voters in places where vote-by-mail is not as easy."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
american civil liberties union of florida

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
united states election assistance commission

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read: The Republicans telling voters to ignore Trump The widespread failures during the primary elections foreshadow a potentially disastrous November election. States such as New York have been racing to make accommodations for voting by mail.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
african american felon disenfranchisement: case studies in modern racism and political exclusion (criminal justice: recent scholarship)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science / political process / campaigns & elections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political process - campaigns & elections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science/political process - campaigns & elections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science / political process / campaigns & elections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political process - campaigns & elections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
political science/political process - campaigns & elections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African American Felon Disenfranchisement: Case Studies in Modern Racism and Political Exclusion (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
African American Felon Disenfranchisement: Case Studies in Modern Racism and Political Exclusion (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship) [John E., Sr. Pinkard] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. African American Felon Disenfranchisement: Case Studies in Modern Racism and Political Exclusion (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote, it seemed as if a new era of political equality was at hand. Before long, however, white segregationists across the South counterattacked, driving their black countrymen from the polls through a combination of sheer terror and insidious devices such as complex literacy tests and expensive poll taxes. Most African Americans would remain voiceless for nearly a century more, citizens in name only until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act secured their access to the ballot.

In Bending Toward Justice, celebrated historian Gary May describes how black voters overcame centuries of bigotry to secure and preserve one of their most important rights as American citizens. The struggle that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act was long and torturous, and only succeeded because of the courageous work of local freedom fighters and national civil rights leaders-as well as, ironically, the opposition of Southern segregationists and law enforcement officials, who won public sympathy for the voting rights movement by brutally attacking peaceful demonstrators. But while the Voting Rights Act represented an unqualified victory over such forces of hate, May explains that its achievements remain in jeopardy. Many argue that the 2008 election of President Barack Obama rendered the act obsolete, yet recent years have seen renewed efforts to curb voting rights and deny minorities the act's hard-won protections. Legal challenges to key sections of the act may soon lead the Supreme Court to declare those protections unconstitutional.

A vivid, fast-paced history of this landmark piece of civil rights legislation, Bending Toward Justice offers a dramatic, timely account of the struggle that finally won African Americans the ballot-although, as May shows, the fight for voting rights is by no means over.

When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote, it seemed as if a new era of political equality was at hand. Before long, however, white segregationists across the South counterattacked, driving their black countrymen from the polls through a combination of sheer terror and insidious devices such as complex literacy tests and expensive poll taxes. Most African Americans would remain voiceless for nearly a century more, citizens in name only until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act secured their access to the ballot.

In Bending Toward Justice, celebrated historian Gary May describes how black voters overcame centuries of bigotry to secure and preserve one of their most important rights as American citizens. The struggle that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act was long and torturous, and only succeeded because of the courageous work of local freedom fighters and national civil rights leaders-as well as, ironically, the opposition of Southern segregationists and law enforcement officials, who won public sympathy for the voting rights movement by brutally attacking peaceful demonstrators. But while the Voting Rights Act represented an unqualified victory over such forces of hate, May explains that its achievements remain in jeopardy. Many argue that the 2008 election of President Barack Obama rendered the act obsolete, yet recent years have seen renewed efforts to curb voting rights and deny minorities the act's hard-won protections. Legal challenges to key sections of the act may soon lead the Supreme Court to declare those protections unconstitutional.

A vivid, fast-paced history of this landmark piece of civil rights legislation, Bending Toward Justice offers a dramatic, timely account of the struggle that finally won African Americans the ballot-although, as May shows, the fight for voting rights is by no means over.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote, it seemed as if a new era of political equality was at hand. Before long, however, white segregationists across the South counterattacked, driving their black countrymen from the polls through a combination of sheer te...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to main content

It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LibGuides: Anti-Racism Resources Guide: Voting and Voter Supression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skip to main content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Carol Anderson is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, where she researches, teaches and writes about race and civil rights in the United States. Her newest book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, tells a modern story about who has voting rights, who can access their voting rights-and who makes those decisions.

The title of your newest book is One Person, No Vote. Why did you choose this title? And what do you hope it will evoke in your readers?

We live in a nation where we have these kinds of sound bites, and we think we understand how this nation works. "We hold these truths." "This is a nation of immigrants." "One person, one vote." But the way that voter suppression works is that it absolutely undermines that basic notion of "one person, one vote," and it becomes "one person, no vote." I wanted to hit the familiar but also to hit that discord that's in there so that we can begin to understand what the attack on democracy looks like.

Voter suppression has always disproportionately affected people of color. How does institutional racism manifest itself in the current systems surrounding voting and elections in the United States?

The civil rights movement dealt with institutional violence and institutional racism that African Americans faced on a daily basis, from utero to coffin. Not even from cradle: utero to coffin. That kind of systemic, institutional racism. And one of the tricks that was deployed was to say, "Well, the signs [enforcing segregation] have come down, and now these black people have a Civil Rights Act, and they've got a Voting Rights Act. And so if anything is really not happening, it's on them. It's because they don't have initiative. It's because they're lazy. It is because they don't want to work hard."

I talked about, in the first chapter in One Person, No Vote, how-[in] the Mississippi Plan of 1890-they knew that they had to deal with this thing called the 15th Amendment that said, "the right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race, color or previous servitude." So Mississippi's looking at this going, "But we don't want black people to vote." So what they did was, they took the societally imposed characteristics of a group of people and then made those societally imposed characteristics the litmus test-the ticket to the ballot.

You don't fund education, and then you require folks to read chunks of the Constitution. We don't have public transportation because we have refused to invest in public transportation. We shut down polling places. We require IDs and only specific types of IDs.

[My previous book] White Rage dealt with the myths of black pathology because this nation needs the narrative of black pathology in order to justify a series of policies. But what we don't get is the inverse of that. ... The narrative that we get is, "How racist can America be? We elected a black man-twice." And it is kind of self-congratulatory because the we-"We elected a black man twice"-that we means whites. It doesn't mean everybody else. [But] the majority of whites did not vote for Obama.

So there are times when I'm giving my talk on White Rage and I get the question, "What are we to do?" And I say, "These are conversations that whites must have with whites because the work that needs to be done ... is in the white community. Black folks can provide you some of the tools, but you've got to do that heavy lifting."

You write, "The reason the Voting Rights Act worked was the advent of vigorous federal intervention, not because the racism that required the law in the first place had stopped." Can we stop racism, in your opinion, without enforcement? What other options do we have?

Enforcement. So, between 1982 and the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, it came out that the Department of Justice had blocked over 700 proposed changes to voting laws by the jurisdictions-those states that were under the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. And the DOJ blocked [the proposed changes] because they were racially discriminatory. ...

...During radical Reconstruction, federal troops are really there [enforcing voting rights] and they know they got to handle business. And we saw that with the rise of black registration, black voter turnout and black elected officials. With the Compromise of 1877, when federal troops are removed from the South, and Rutherford B. Hayes is like, "Yo, you're on your own. Peace," you start seeing this thing begin to move and shift until we get to massive disfranchisement in 1890, and there was no enforcement. None. And the impact of that was by the time-I think it was 1940-only 3 percent of African Americans were registered to vote in the South.

What is missing in the ways we teach and talk about voting in our country, and what are the best ways to learn about voter suppression?

In K-12, you get kind of an arc that the Founding Fathers crafted this beautiful Constitution, and you can almost hear the harps playing in the background. And then, you get a sense that, "Oh, but something didn't go quite right, so we had to have a little Civil War. Because there was this thing called slavery. And Lincoln freed the slaves." And then we get ... "Go west, young man! From sea to shining sea!"

Struggle is missing. Racism is missing. The battle for citizenship is missing. The steps forward and the steps back, the kinds of racialized opposition to full enfranchisement, the gendered opposition to full enfranchisement. All of that is missing in that arc.

We don't educate about voting. North Carolina, which had been a very progressive government, had high school voter registration. When students were taking their civics class, they were being registered to vote as well. So they got a sense that voting was part of your civic engagement; it was your right as a citizen. When the Republicans came to power in 2010, not only did they close early voting sites and reduce early voting hours and require certain types of voter ID, but they stopped registration in high schools. So voting and registering becomes a task that you do instead of part of your identity. ... And so they don't have a voice-a political voice-and they don't have an economic voice.

You write in the book, "It can never be forgotten that the state that produced the Eugene 'Bull' Connors, the Sheriff Jim Clarks and Judge Roy Moores also created the civil rights warriors who took down and defeated Bull and Jim and now had Roy in their crosshairs." Talk about the people and organizations working to protect the right to vote. What can we learn from them?

We saw our power. Folks knew that work needed to be done, and the state wasn't going to do it. They knew what was at stake. So, watching the NAACP [get] the list of the voters that hadn't voted in 2016 (or voting intermittently) and get all of their members [to] start calling. Just talking-Alabamian to Alabamian-then following up, knocking on doors, continuing the conversation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Carol Anderson on Voter Suppression: A Q&A with the Author of 'One Person, No Vote'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Carol Anderson is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, where she researches, teaches and writes about race and civil rights in the United States. Her newest book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, tells a modern story about who has voting rights, who can access their voting rights-and who makes those decisions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Voting means more than casting ballots; voting means securing political and economic power, civil rights, prison reform, juvenile justice, international human rights and more. But the United States has a long history of limiting the right to vote of women and people of color through property ownership, taxes, registration and residency laws, and tests.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Teaching Activities (Free)

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 2020.
Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.

Time Periods: All US History

Themes: Voting Rights, Civil Rights Movements, Democracy & Citizenship

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
2020 is both an election year and the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 15th Amendment, making it an important time to invite our students to consider the history of voting rights in the United States. The struggle for the ballot is emblematic of the struggle to make real the democratic promises of this country's founding narrative. Just as the United States has never been a true "government by the people, for the people," the right to vote has always been incomplete, contested, and compromised by the racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia of policymakers and the interests they act to protect. In a moment of renewed and insidious voter suppression, examining the history of voting rights also presents an opportunity to challenge the deeply entrenched fable of the steady forward progress of U.S. history. Voting rights have expanded in the last 400 years, but they have also been taken away, requiring activists to rise up, again and again, to restore the achievements of prior generations. The fight for the ballot is ongoing.

Recent elections have brought forth the old problem of voter suppression in a new guise - voter ID laws, voter roll purges, polling places shuttered. As activists combat these restrictive, antidemocratic measures, it is vital that we provide students historical context for their efforts, which is why the Zinn Education Project has put together a cluster of lessons on the history of voting rights in the United States. These lessons can be taught individually, but they are presented here as a progression.

The first lesson considers the question of who should vote. Students first share their understanding of what makes a "qualified" voter, then reconsider their thinking after a close reading of an oral history by Fannie Lou Hamer.

The second lesson asks students to predict how policymakers might have restricted the right to vote for certain groups to thwart movements and laws that expanded voting rights.

The final lesson is a mixer role play in which students learn about a variety of people with firsthand experience having their voting rights granted or denied. The roles reach back as far as the colonial era and forward to the present. This lesson closes with a timeline activity in which students create a visual map depicting the expansion and contraction of voting rights over time.

SMU Dedman School of Law professor Grant M. Hayden has written:

The history of voting in the United States has not been characterized by a smooth and inexorable progress toward universal political participation. It has instead been much messier, littered with periods of both expansion and retraction of the franchise with respect to many groups of potential voters.

Young people need to know this "messier" history; it is a history that calls us to action, a history that conveys that voting rights are not definitively won, but must be struggled for and defended.

Classroom Stories

High Social Studies Administrator, Bayside, New York

Middle Social Studies Teacher, New York City, New York

High Social Studies Teacher, Monrovia, California

High Social Studies Teacher, Oregon

Loved being able to lead a @ZinnEdProject session today for other district teachers! We did the voting rights mixer and it was a blast! So many great conversations and ideas💡for implementing 🙌🏼 @CFB_Soc_Studies @mrschapman808 pic.twitter.com/gkqvy2mxOT

- History Gone TRUONG! (@truong_terri) February 14, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States - Zinn Education Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teaching Activities (Free) Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 2020. Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One answer to the various GOP-backed proposals that seek to restrict voting access is a 791-page piece of federal legislation known as H.R. 1. The bill, also referred to as the "For the People Act" was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on March 3, and if passed in the Senate it would address the various methods of voter suppression that continue being employed by the GOP. This bill will require states to: automatically register eligible voters and offer same-day registration, restore the voting rights of former felons, allow no-excuse absentee balloting, and offer 15 days of early voting. H.R. 1 also seeks to make our elections more ethical by enforcing more restrictions and transparency in regard to campaign financing and by restricting partisan gerrymandering (when a political party redraws boundaries for its own benefit). Another iteration of the "For the People Act" was passed by House Democrats in 2019, but it was blocked in the Senate by Mitch McConnell. Now that the Democrats have control of the House, Senate, and White House, they have a chance to pass this groundbreaking legislation, but the odds are slim because of the highly controversial filibuster. To overcome a filibuster, H.R. 1 will need the support of all 48 Democrats, the 2 Independents who caucus with them, and 10 Republicans.

Still, organizers are mobilizing for the passage of the bill as the Democrats' best chance to curtail voter suppression once and for all. Shana Gallagher, who designed and ran "Students for Bernie," is one of the three Bernie 2020 staffers who recently launched Un-PAC to organize students and young people to demand democratic reform.

"Young people are rightfully disillusioned and detached. Making it even harder for us to vote is going to further exacerbate that," Gallagher told Teen Vogue. "[The act] would do more to build and maintain the political power of our generation than anything else we've seen in our lifetimes. In general, I think it's the closest thing to a silver bullet that I've ever seen when it comes to making our democracy actually functional and accountable and representative."

"I think our generation cares about a lot of issues," Gallagher continued. "So many young people are extremely passionate about making a positive difference in the world, but often do not connect the issues that we care about to big money in politics and the need to get that out of the way before we can see solutions to things like climate change, systemic racism, access to affordable health care, and canceling student debt. Young people were the margin of victory for Joe Biden in the last election and our turnout was up by over 10%. But the Democratic Party can't expect that to keep happening if they don't deliver for our generation."

As a kid, growing up Black in America before I even understood what the two parties had to offer someone like me, the one thing I did know was that the Republican Party didn't care about me - it didn't care about my Blackness and it didn't respect my autonomy as a woman. For years, many Black people knew the GOP used "conservative values" as a mask for supporting sexist, racist, xenophobic legislation. But what has been revealed to me over the last several years, especially through the party's continued suppression of voters, is that Republicans would rather dismantle our democracy than embrace the identities, perspectives, and needs of Americans. America isn't some ideal or image that these leaders have in their minds. It is the people who inhabit it. We are the blood and the oxygen that flows through this place and keeps it alive. We are Black, brown, white, wealthy, poor, disabled, men, women, gender non-conforming, people who love whoever we choose to love. We are so many things, but we are one. The Republican Party's dismissal of one is a dismissal of us all.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: These Teens Are Leading the Fight to Lower the Voting Age

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the GOP's Racist Voting Bills Could Be Stopped

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One answer to the various GOP-backed proposals that seek to restrict voting access is a 791-page piece of federal legislation known as H.R. 1. The bill, also referred to as the "For the People Act" was passed by the U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Biden Administration Can Protect Voting Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The attorney general under Joe Biden should designate assistant U.S. attorney to help ensure compliance with federal voting laws and the Administration should ensure that people in custody who are eligible to vote can exercise that right.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CNN Political Briefing - Voter Suppression Isn't New

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Republican legislatures across the country are pushing new voter restrictions, and many of those potential changes would disproportionately affect communities of color. On today's CNN Political Briefing, CNN Race and Equality senior writer Nicquel Terry Ellis explains the effects of these current proposals and how they fit the historical pattern of voter suppression in America.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We're one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there's more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. Democracy itself is on the ballot.

Democracy has, in particular, become Stacey Abrams's animating mission. In 2018, Abrams lost the Georgia gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin amid rampant voter suppression. Since then, as the founder of Fair Fight, she's turned her attention to the deeper fight, the one that sets the rules under which elections like hers play out. In her recent book, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, Abrams makes the case that the fight over democracy is the central question of our politics, with more power and clarity than any other politician I've heard.

In my view, Abrams is right. And so she's exactly the person to hear from on the eve of the election. In this conversation, we discuss the GOP's turn against "rank democracy," the role of demographic change, how Republicans have cemented minority rule across American political institutions, why we potentially face a "doom loop of democracy," the changing face of voter suppression in the 21st century, what a system that actually wanted people to vote would look like, why democracy and economic equality are inextricably linked, and much more.

One thing to note: You won't hear Trump's name all that much. It's the Republican Party, not just Trump, that has turned against democracy, and that is implementing the turn against democracy. And it's the Democratic Party, not just Joe Biden, that will have to decide whether democracy is worth protecting, and achieving. Democracy is on the ballot in 2020 and beyond, but it's not just on the presidential voting line.

You can listen to our whole conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show or wherever you get your podcasts. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ezra Klein

A few weeks ago, Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah, tweeted that "Democracy isn't the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that."

What did you hear when you read that?

Stacey Abrams

I heard the quiet part out loud - a Republican Party that has abandoned its pretense of changing minds and intends to manipulate rules.

What [Lee] was saying is that if we have reached a stage where our ideas can no longer garner sufficient votes to elect us, then we just have to do what we must to ensure that our vision of prosperity and liberty is the prevailing vision, regardless of whether the people want it or not.

Ezra Klein

What do you think "rank democracy" means?

Stacey Abrams

I saw it as an insult. Typically when someone uses the term "rank," what they mean is the most puerile, the most base, the least cultivated. So for him it was very much a disparaging term. This notion that the populace, the lowest of the low, get to make decisions for themselves through this act called democracy - that to him was revolting.

Ezra Klein

I had George Will on this show a while back because he wrote a book called The Conservative Sensibility. In it, he places James Madison's "catechism of popular government" at the core of the conservative project. And he writes, "What is the worst result of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority."

This is the sort of argument a lot of Republican thinkers make: that democracy is a trampling of the rights of minorities by the majority. In response to a piece I wrote on democracy, Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, responded, "So you want majorities to violate the rights of minorities (and individuals)? Because that's what pure democracy is."

What's your response to the idea that the anti-democratic impulse is motivated by the protection of minority rights?

Stacey Abrams

There's a dual reaction. It's so unabashedly ... I'd use the word facile because this is an attempt to twist something that is not just anti-democratic, but anti-civil rights, and to form it into something that seems noble, which it is not.

But the second reaction is it's a cry of loss. It's this recognition that their ideological underpinnings no longer have salience - that they can no longer lean on this majority they created because that majority is now quickly becoming a minority. And embedded in this argument is a fear that what they have visited on others through the trampling of civil rights, through the trampling of human rights, through the exclusion of so many communities will now be visited upon the Republican Party and upon conservative thinkers.

But before getting to that, I think there is this very basic misapplication because what democracy has garnered for the last 243 years, when it has been appropriately applied, has been the expansion of rights for minorities. The expansion of inclusion. Their argument is that inclusion has become too effective. And in order to preserve their ideological constructs, that inclusion must be thwarted.

They are trying to use James Madison and his arguments to undermine the entire experiment because the outcome of the experiment no longer caters to their ideological belief systems.

Ezra Klein

In your book, the election of Barack Obama is a central part of the narrative about the attack on voting rights. What did Obama's election set off?

Stacey Abrams

The Obama election was proof of the fruition of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When coupled with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act was the embodiment of the protection of the rights of the minority. It said you will be able to participate in your governance for the first time and those who would intercede or block you will be restrained from doing so.

When Barack Obama was elected, it was among the most effective elections we've ever had because it brought out communities that had long been denied access, who had long excluded themselves because they did not believe they were welcome, who had never been engaged or even invited into participation. Because of the nature of his campaign, because of the nature of his election, and, yes, because he was a Black man who represented so much of what had been done wrong in America and could be made right, his election was emblematic of what democracy could achieve.

What Republicans saw in that election was the worst nightmare of a party that refuses to meet the moment and to adapt to a changing populace. They are still governing from a space of irritation that anyone else would dare to think their voices matter. And so what we saw following [Obama's] election was the immediate retrenchment of almost any right that could be pulled back and pulled away from minority voters. Because their participation at such numbers was able to create this sea of change in what it meant to be a president in the United States.

Ezra Klein

One of the things that your book emphasizes is the connection between demographic change in this country - of groups also attaining power in our democracy - and the rollback of voting rights. What seems to be happening here is a lag between the power of this rising generation and the geography of this country as it exists, the way elections are actually run as exists, and, of course, the Supreme Court.

You emphasize the Shelby v. Holder decision, which gutted much of the Voting Rights Act, as setting the stage for a really different equilibrium around voting rights than we had even 10 years ago. Can you talk a bit about that case and what it allowed to happen?

Stacey Abrams

To understand the impact of Shelby, you have to first understand the nature of the right to vote in America. There is no constitutional right to vote. There have been three constitutional amendments that removed restrictions on who was permitted to vote: the 15th, 19th and 26th amendment. In the 15th Amendment, Black men were granted the franchise; in the 19th Amendment, women were granted the franchise; the 25th Amendment expanded the franchise to those 18 to 21.

But the reality is that the right to vote does not exist as an affirmative opportunity. What does exist in the Constitution is the delegation of authority for the administration of elections to states, which sounds very benign until you realize that for most of American history, voter suppression has been almost entirely the construct of states.

What the Voting Rights Act did in 1965 was shatter the impermeable nature of states to say who could and could not vote. The Voting Rights Act said you could not use race - and, by 1975, that you could not use language - as a way to preclude access to the right to vote. It said that states could not take proactive steps to block the right to vote through poll taxes, literacy tests, closing of polling places - any action that would interfere with the right of people of color, or people who spoke English as a second language, to vote. In states that had a long and storied history of blocking the right to vote, no new voting laws could be countenanced without having the Department of Justice approve.

Fast forward to 2013. By that point we'd had this extraordinary success where the Voting Rights Act not only increased the number of people who were participating in our elections, it also increased the number of people of color who were being elected to higher office. And from its very beginning, there were attacks on the Voting Rights Act because it was seen as too interventionist. It was seen as taking away states' rights to discriminate against who could participate in elections.

In 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated of the Voting Rights Act with the gutting of Section 5. That was essentially a get out of jail free card for states that wanted to discriminate; what was different this time is that it was no longer relegated to those states that participated in voter suppression through Jim Crow.

You had a proliferation across the country of voter suppression techniques that had been prohibited clearly by the Voting Rights Act. That's why you saw the rapid shutdown of polling places. That's why you saw the expansion of restrictive voter ID laws. That's why in 2020, we are seeing so many cases that essentially challenge state laws designed to restrict who has access to the right to vote.

Ezra Klein

The Voting Rights Act was built to deal with voter suppression specifically on the basis of race. But something I want to draw out in the argument you make there is that, in this period, while race is still a huge component of modern-day voter suppression, the Republican Party's partisan incentives have actually broadened who they target as a part of these efforts. The intent of voter suppression is to promote a national party's interests, not just to protect southern racism.

Stacey Abrams

Agreed. One of the reasons I always include the 26th Amendment in my litany is that some of the most aggressive attacks on voting rights have targeted young people. Young people are the least likely to have the types of ID that are required and have faced restrictions on the types of IDs they can use.

The most popular example is in Texas, where you can vote with your gun license but you cannot vote with your student ID. The New Hampshire legislature has attempted to restrict the domicile of students because they knew students have an impact on their elections. In Florida, Republicans removed early voting locations through legislation because too many students voted in the last election.

So, yes, what began as an attack on largely African Americans - and Latinos and Native Americans in Arizona - has expanded. People of color have always been the target, and then you layer on top of that young people and poor people. In that you see a coalition that has long suffered from oppression under conservative ideology and would be much more likely to access good policy if their ability to participate in "rank democracy" was real.

How Republicans have used the "doom loop of democracy" to cement minority rule

Ezra Klein

Something that I worry about a lot right now is what I've taken to calling the "doom loop of democracy." You have a Republican Party that increasingly wins power through winning a minority share of the vote. The president lost the popular vote. The Republican majority in Senate represents something like 15 million fewer people than the Democratic minority in the Senate. Then they appoint Republican judges to the Supreme Court, which makes crucial decisions about what forms of voter suppression and electoral rigging are constitutional.

So you have this situation where a party that wins power undemocratically uses that power to then make it easier to win undemocratically, setting off the loop again and again and again. And that can really lead a country in a deeply undemocratic direction because if you rewrite the rules of the game, then ultimately the other party has no choice but to follow them.

How serious of a risk do you think that is if Republicans are able to keep winning this way?

Stacey Abrams

It's absolutely the risk that we face.

One of my dear friends William Dobson wrote a book called The Dictator's Learning Curve, and he uses this approach as one of the examples of how authoritarian populists become dictators, how they gradually accrue power. They use the systems to their benefit and when the systems no longer benefit them, they manipulate the externalities of those systems to give themselves permanent power.

In the United States, what we're watching through gerrymandering, trying to restrict access to absentee ballots during a pandemic, creating laws and rules that, by their own admission, are intended to limit access to democracy - it creates this loop where you can keep using the system to strangle democracy until, to misappropriate Grover Norquist, you make it small enough that you can drown it in a bathtub.

The challenge is that, given the structure of our system, as long as they can maintain a certain degree of power, even the overwhelming majority of Americans are insufficient to guarantee that democracy works. That's the challenge of the Electoral College. Its genesis was grounded in racism and classism, but its longevity is grounded in this notion that this is the last vestige of a type of system that will permit victory. Not to those who can win the greatest number of votes but to those who can manipulate the system to their benefit.

Ezra Klein

The reason I started our conversation by focusing on the building of a genuine anti-democratic ideology in Republican and conservative circles is that this kind of thing is hard to do if it is in too much conflict with your rhetoric, or it's in too much conflict with what the people in your party believe.

When gerrymandering comes on the ballot, it often loses. You've seen red states move toward independent commissions. There are a lot of ordinary Republicans who have pretty small-d democratic ideas about how government should work. But as the party's elites become more committed to an actual anti-democratic ideology, then what seems reasonable to do in the examples we've been talking about becomes very different.

If part of your animating purpose as a party is to not allow "rank democracy" to overturn the rights of the minority - by which you mean your rights as a political minority who's losing elections to stay in power - then these things become necessary. You're waging a noble war against the mob.

The power grab here, I think, is actually driving the ideological change. But the ideological change ends up over time justifying ever more extreme versions of the power grab that would have been shocking to people, say, 10 years ago.

Stacey Abrams

We know that what is being couched by Mike Lee and others as nobility and protection is nothing more than fear. Even calling it sore loser-dom underwhelmingly describes what's happening.

We know that the demographic shifts in the United States portend a very dramatic shift in the allocation of resources and power. Part of that is the fact that for so many years these communities were denied access to those resources, denied access to that power. The responsible retort to that is to invite these new persons into the shared power structure that is our democracy. That's the right thing to do. There is absolutely a negotiation that should happen about how fast and what the remedies are, but instead of engaging in that dialogue, Republicans have decided that the answer at the macro level is simply to refuse to play the game fair.

In 2018, 65 percent of Floridians restored the voting rights of ex-offenders. This was not done along party lines. It was a bipartisan solution to a problem that was grounded in slavery and racism. And yet, because it was going to cost them elections, the will of the people was absolutely ignored by a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, and then by conservative control of our court system.

"Republicans have decided that the answer ... is simply to refuse to play the game fair"

The moment the Republican Party decided that it could not win based on actually meeting people where they are, that the only way to win was to rewrite the rules of the system, and that they were going to undermine 243 years of a commonly held belief in our nation that democratic processes are a native good - that desperation has, I think, done more damage to the longevity of the party than almost anything else I've seen them do in recent years.

The pernicious logic of voter suppression in the 21st century

Ezra Klein

To reiterate just how deep this has gotten, Mike Lee is now among a number of elected Republicans who has argued for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end the direct election of US senators.

Of course, the reason is that Republicans are much stronger in state legislatures than they are in actual statewide elections. If you just looked at the way the legislatures are broken down now, repealing the 17th Amendment would give Republicans at least 58 seats in the US Senate. The thoroughgoing nature of the move away from democracy is bigger than people recognize.

But I want to sit in this tension between how much Republican elites have begun to turn against democracy and the degree to which that turn still conflicts with the way people understand fair elections. Something you write about really eloquently in the book is the way voter suppression now has to cloak itself in the guise of "user error" - the idea that your vote is getting rejected not because we didn't want you to vote but because you screwed up. Can you talk a bit about that?

Stacey Abrams

When I decided not to concede [Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial] election, I acknowledged the legal sufficiency of the numbers. I challenged the system that permitted those numbers to be the tote board, and I challenged the legitimacy of a system that could permit voters to be denied their rights - not because they weren't eligible but because of some failings of rules and bureaucratic restrictions.

The insidious nature of voter suppression in the 21st century is that it no longer uses the blunt instruments of law enforcement or the literacy test as obstacles to voting. Instead, you see different versions of, say, the poll tax. The poll tax is now making ex-offenders pay fees and fines. There's also a poll tax in making people stand in line for hours on end. In most states, you do not get paid time off to vote, which means that you have to spend what essentially amounts to a day's worth of pay. If you're in Georgia or Texas, standing in an eight hour line, you have lost those wages and you have threatened or jeopardized your job.

But when people look at it from the outside, they say: Well, those people made that choice. It is not a choice that should be foisted upon any American to decide between keeping your job and casting a vote. But we make it the personal responsibility of each individual citizen as opposed to questioning a system that works with extraordinary fluidity in wealthier parts of the community, and works with the pace of a snail in Black and brown communities.

Another example is when polling places close down. When that happens, the argument is: If you really wanted to vote, you would make your way to vote. Well, if you live in a community without public transit and the one or two polling places that were near you are now 10 or 15 miles away, you physically are precluded from being able to exercise the right to vote. But that's often attributed to your failure to plan.

With voter ID laws, it's the most aggressive pseudo-logic that I've ever heard. America has always required that you prove who you are to vote. What is different today is not that you need ID - it's the form of ID you have to have. And it's the extraordinary difficulty of accessing those specific forms of ID that gets elided. People get treated as though they're just too lazy. They have the ID they need to get on a plane or buy beer but not to vote - which is completely untrue.

Those are examples of how bureaucratic rules take on the veneer of logic but have the most heartless effect, because they distract from the responsibility of the state to engage in providing the right to vote. They also convince citizens that it's either too hard, or that they were not worthy enough, and that they didn't work hard enough.

"It is it is not a choice that should be foisted upon any American to decide between keeping your job and casting a vote"

And when you do that, you not only block them from voting - you discourage entire communities from voting. Those stories become legend and that legend becomes truth. Communities decide it's not worth it because it's just too hard. And it's not that they didn't try; it is that the barriers to access were nearly impossible. And why keep beating your head against a stone wall?

Ezra Klein

Something you articulate really nicely in the book is that this suppressive, unresponsive voting system creates another feedback loop.

Let's say you're a voter and you fight your way through this obstacle course. You end up waiting in line for four hours to vote a day when you've got parenting responsibilities and occupational responsibilities. And it was hot and you just sat there. And then you vote for somebody and, even though they win the majority, they don't actually get put into office; or they do but can't do anything because of the filibuster or a last minute power grab. So nothing changes for you. You did all this just to be disappointed.

I think it becomes very rational after that - when so much is being asked of you to vote and so little comes back from your vote - to begin to detach from the system. Exhaustion is a very powerful tool of voter suppression.

Stacey Abrams

Absolutely. Exhaustion and despair are both incredibly legitimate reasons for not participating. There is a legitimate reason to feel despair if you've lived in intergenerational poverty and every time you've attempted to participate in the system, the response has been not simply to make it difficult but make it worthless. The solution isn't to harangue someone into voting - it is to do what you can to mitigate those obstacles.

I think that's the place where the crafty nature of the Republican Party has been situated for 20 years. They can count. They know that we have reached a demographic inflection point that is no longer simply one of numbers but numbers that have power attached to them.

That's why it is no longer feasible to simply use the traditional means of voter suppression. The nuclear option that has been employed is designed to try to meet a moment that has been predicted for 30 years but has only come to real fruition in the last decade.

What a system that actually wanted people to vote would look like

Ezra Klein

What would a system that wanted people to vote look like?

Stacey Abrams

Oregon and Washington do it pretty well.

One is automatic registration. Not this notion of automatic registration when you go and get your driver's license and can register at the DMV. That is still making a condition of suffrage that you have to go and get an ID. Your birthright as a citizen should be your guarantee of suffrage in the United States. Therefore, it should be the government's responsibility to register you to vote automatically.

Number two is same-day registration. You should have to register to vote when you get to a new place, but you shouldn't have to time your move to figure out the deadline for showing up. You should be able to register on the day you go to vote and be able to demonstrate that you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live.

We should have automatic mail-in voting. We should have automatic access to early voting. And, of course, same-day voting. We should have voting centers. You should not have to rely on a precinct-based system because what early voting proves in every single state where it is active is that you don't have to actually go to the schoolhouse down the street from you in order to cast your ballot.

We should have voting as a holiday in addition to making certain that every person gets paid time off to go and vote. Both are necessary. The holiday recognizes that the majority of people are probably going to take Election Day as the day they cast their ballots. But we have populations, including those who are caregivers to the disabled, who will need to be working on Election Day. You have entire populations that cannot meet a single day of opportunity. So we need to provide paid time off to go and vote.

And we need to have systems that mean that you don't have to give someone eight hours of time off to go and vote because the systems should be equitable, not equal. Equal says you need this exact same thing. Equitable says we meet you and your needs where you are. And often for communities of color, namely Black communities, the challenge is that they are still resourced at their pre-engagement level and at the last level of any attention being paid. So they have fewer resources. They do not account for surges in voting and they often have substandard equipment.

Those are the major pieces to it. There is a lot more that I could go into but those basics would transform our elections because the architecture of voter suppression is, Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does your ballot get counted? Same day and automatic registration take care of the first; early voting centers and making sure that people have time off take care of the second.

And the third is making certain that because we now have uniformity in the ways we vote, we then diminish the likelihood of votes being cast out. That's the most important piece: If you make it through this gantlet, you should be secure in the fact that your vote will count.

Ezra Klein

We've been talking here about the way the Republican Party has become the anti- democracy party - the way they've become ideologically committed to that and have become somewhat creative in trying to to make that more of a reality.

Has the Democratic Party become the reverse? They passed HR 1, which is a big package of voting reforms, and HR 4, which is an attempt to restore key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, through the House in 2019. Are those sufficient? Do you think the party is committed to this in the way the Republican Party is committed to its opposite?

Stacey Abrams

I think we are. And I think it's because the composition of the Democratic Party is antithetical to the composition of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is predominantly white. Almost everyone else are Democrats. Because we have a two-party system, that's what we have. So it's a matter of survival, I think, for Democrats to actually pay attention to the nature of how democracy should work.

One of our challenges has been that for many years we knew voter suppression was real, but we had been coached into not calling it out because the fear was if you spoke it aloud it would have the effect of dissuading voters. I grew up in the South. Voter suppression has the effect of dissuading voters. So my willingness to call it out comes about because whether you say or not, we are experiencing it and we have the responsibility to actually name the enemy and can advocate for change.

So I do think that HR 1 and HR 4, which is the John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, but also [Sen. Ron] Wyden's bill, [Sen. Amy] Klobuchar's bill - we've seen good bills that have come out during Covid that I think move us further than HR 1, because I believe automatic absentee balloting and mail-in balloting need to become the law of the land in every state.

And every state should have uniform rules. We should not have 43 cases being waged to determine if you make a mistake, you get to fix it? Do you have to find a witness in the midst of quarantine to get your ballot in? Do you have to have a notary public who is not allowed to have human contact authorize your absentee ballot?

We should use our learnings from Covid to make certain that no matter where you live in America, you have the same baseline access to democracy. If a state wants to do something to make it easier, they should be able to, but no state should be permitted to make it harder.

Ezra Klein

If Democrats win the House, the presidency and the Senate, HR 1 and HR 4 will will pass the House again and will die immediately in the Senate due to a filibuster. There is absolutely no chance they will get through a filibuster. And they can't go through budget reconciliation.

I thought one of the most striking things that happened this year was when Barack Obama stood at John Lewis's memorial and told the assembled Democrats that if they wanted to honor John Lewis, they should pass these bills. And if the filibuster stopped them, they should get rid of the filibuster because it has always been used to stop voting rights, civil rights, and racial equality in this country.

What do you think about the filibuster? And what would you say to Senate Democrats who say they are committed to democracy but worry that getting rid of the filibuster would undermine the political system and the comity and compromise needed to make it work?

Stacey Abrams

I would refer them to the statement that opened this conversation. Mike Lee was saying the quiet part out loud. I believe in eliminating the filibuster because if we can guarantee permanent access to the right to vote in the United States, we will have the obligation at the federal level and the Senate level to actually negotiate in good faith.

The filibuster has been a useful tool, but it was only useful when people actually believed in and abided by the basic rules of the system. The Republican Party has shown itself incapable of following rules it does not like. And we cannot get to a nation where citizens get to participate in the selection of senators if we do not eliminate the filibuster to create the very baseline democracy that we require for this time.

Ezra Klein

I'm going to nudge a bit on this idea that the Republican Party has been unable to follow rules it doesn't like. What I think is interesting about the Republican Party is that they will follow the rules. It just turned out the rules created a minoritarian path to power and a minority path to obstruction.

I think you get the political parties and the political system that your rules will deliver. If you can block everything as a minority party, you will. If you can't, then maybe you accept a compromise to get things done because having your hands on a bill is better than being useless and out of power. If you can't win with 46 percent of the two-party vote, as the Republican Party did in 2016, then maybe you'll pick standard-bearers who might win 51 percent of the vote. I think we've lost this idea that you want to create rules that are going to give you the kind of political competition that you want.

My one piece of optimism about the Republican Party is that I think if they had to compete for votes, they would. It's just that the rules don't make them compete for votes, so they don't.

Stacey Abrams

This notion of the filibuster, to your point, is a romanticized idea that this is what gives the Senate nobility. No, it gives the Senate deniability. They get to pretend that they couldn't come to a decision because they couldn't get to 60 out of 100.

We haven't always had 100 senators. We also have not always had the filibuster. And what we do need is begin to restore the building blocks of our democracy. We've got to make sure that certain Americans can vote. Which is why, in my mind and in the mind of President Obama, if you have to destroy a made-up rule to save the basic notion of who we are as a nation - a republic that elects its leadership and a democracy that determines how that leadership takes shape - it is worth doing.

Why democracy and economic equality are inextricably linked

Ezra Klein

We've been talking so far about the political aspect of democracy - the access to the political system itself. But I want to, in the time we have left, talk about a couple of the other components, one of which is the economic dimension.

We live in a time of extreme income and wealth inequality. We also live in a time when a lot of people have very, very little. They don't have a job. They don't have Medicaid in many states that have not expanded the Affordable Care Act. And there are ideas of democracy that go well beyond the political aspects - that argue that there's a certain amount of sufficiency needed and equality needed in order for there to be a better level of democratic equality in relations between people.

I'm curious how you think about that economic dimension of it and what it does or doesn't demand of us.

Stacey Abrams

That is what animates me as much as anything else. When I did not become governor, I had some time. I created Fair Fight to focus on protecting access to democracy and protecting the franchise itself. I created Fair Count because the US Census is the least understood and most powerful instrument of strategy, planning, and investment in this nation. And I created the Southern Economic Advancement Project because the reason we need the right to vote and the reason we need a fair and accurate census is that the policies that govern our daily lives, particularly those economic policies, determine the quality of life that we get to live.

I believe in democracy because I think it is the best system available for governments. I believe in voting not because of its mystic power as an act but because voting is how we get to the things we need.

For me, the pragmatism of a fair and active and abled democracy is that it is the only way we can tackle these intractable issues: income inequality, wealth inequality, lack of access to health care, an education system that is entirely predicated on your zip code and your race - these challenges cannot be met if we do not have an active and engaged democracy that includes the voices and the lives of those who suffer most when we do not make the best choices.

"I believe in voting not because of its mystic power as an act but because voting is how we get to the things we need"

So, yes, the economic dimension to me is the motivating factor. I grew up working poor in Mississippi and in many ways my parents were able to either abrogate the effects of poverty or work around it.But people aren't born into the world with my parents. And so my obligation, my commitment, my drive is grounded in this idea that our economic well-being is entirely premised on our access to democracy.

Ezra Klein

You tell a story in your book about a Republican colleague of yours who pulls you aside during a debate over spending on education and says, "Well, look, you didn't have any of this and you turned out fine." Could tell that story? I think it speaks a lot to the dueling ideologies around this particular question.

Stacy Abrams

Yes. He was from wealth and he represented two counties: one that was a very wealthy white county and the other that was a poor and a majority county of color. And in this debate about investment in education, he was just befuddled by why I would argue for pouring more resources into communities that, in his mind, had simply refused to educate themselves.

He said to me, "Well you, Stacey - you turned out fine. Why would we need to do this?" And my answer to him was, "Not everyone is born with my parents." My parents figured out the cartography of Gulfport, Mississippi, to get us zoned into the best deal possible while we still lived on the poorest street imaginable in that side of town. And that was before GPS.

Families should not have to do the type of navigation, manipulation and prayer that my parents had to do to guarantee opportunity for their children. That is antithetical to who we hold ourselves out to be as a nation. I believe that there is no guarantee of equality of success but there should be a guarantee of equality of opportunity.

If our systems are situated properly, if we are doing our work right, then we can achieve equality of opportunity and we can achieve equity of outcome that meets what people are willing and able to put into the systems.

Ezra Klein

That story left me thinking about something Jared Kushner just said in an interview on Fox and Friends. "One thing we've seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about. But he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful."

I think what animates some of the Republican Party's attack on democracy itself is the idea that there are no power differentials. People just want an unfair hand up. If you don't win the competition, it's on you. If you can't navigate the election system, it's on you. And in the meantime they're throwing up barriers to that.

Stacey Abrams

I think that animating dynamic in the Republican Party is real. It is pervasive and it is unlikely to be eliminated in the single election cycle - or three. I do not believe that we elect saviors. I am hopeful that a Biden administration will approach these questions not just with empathy with but with an actual understanding of historical impediments that are not long ago history.

We have to remember when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 1975, that was the first time it actually took care of Native American and Latinos who were still being subjected to literacy tests by the man who went on to become the chief justice of the US Supreme Court. The inability of Blacks to build wealth through housing is directly related to federal policy. And so there is either a misunderstanding of history or a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the connections of the laws and policies that have guided the lives of so many who have been oppressed or underinvested in for so long in this country.

Ezra Klein

If Joe Biden and the Democrats win, do you think that will actually bring change in a way that people will notice in their lives?

Stacey Abrams

If you read Biden's Build Back Better plan - if you look at what is in the racial equity plan - it is an incredible acknowledgment of what remains to be done and it is still not enough. That is why democracy in its fullest form is so important - because we need people who wake up and believe that they get to vote for a mayor, for a governor, for a president, but then they also get to vote for school board members who do not run on the proposition of eliminating access to their education.

When you have a robust democracy that is fully engaged and that is fully accessible to those who are eligible, what you then see are actual changes in the outcomes of lives. In part because, again, there are more of us than there have been before. The demographic inflection point isn't simply a change in who votes for Democrat or Republican. It's a change in who can participate and force those changes to be permanent. I think that is the most terrifying part of this evolution for Republicans. It was one thing to try to block communities from participation - and it was quite convenient that certain communities exempted or simply didn't participate because of past history. That was not actually their direct fault in 2020, but they've enjoyed it.

But the reality is, whether it is a Democrat or Republican or a federalist who imposes voter suppression, if we as a nation can finally break those barriers and create opportunity for participation, I believe that we can make the changes we need. It will not happen in a single Biden administration. It will not happen in a decade. But we can lay the foundations and we can make aggressive progress because the most important part of the demographic changes we are seeing is that they're not going to stop.
Will you help keep Vox free for all?
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It's essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven't, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We're one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there's more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. Democracy itself is on the ballot. Democracy has, in particular, become Stacey Abrams's animating mission.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Who has a say in American democracy? The answer has changed many times since this country's founding. People of all races and genders can now vote. But over time, barriers have been put in their way. Here are the hosts of NPR's history podcast Throughline, Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei.

RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: On February 26, 1870, just a few years after the Civil War had ended, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, granting all Black men the right to vote. It was a moment of hope, of progress. But it was soon met with intense resistance, especially in the South.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting, unintelligible).

DAVID BLIGHT: This counterrevolution by the white South was wrecked upon Black America. It was wrecked upon free people.

RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: This is David Blight, author of "Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom."

BLIGHT: The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and many other imitators who will wage a informal, largely vigilante terror war against Black politics and the Black right to vote using intimidation and using virulent, you know, white supremacy.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I remember my mother taking us to the back of the house and pulling down the blinds and closing the curtains because the Klan was marching.

BLIGHT: And by and large, it succeeded by the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of that era we tend to call the Jim Crow era.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ABDELFATAH: The Jim Crow era would last almost a hundred years and would be defined by the violent, systematic oppression of Black Americans across the South.

BLIGHT: Some of the most pernicious forms of voter suppression - I mean, blatant discriminations - poll taxes, you know, literacy tests. And there were all kinds of weird machinations that the Southern states went to to prevent Blacks from voting.

CAROL ANDERSON: By the time the U.S. is getting ready to fight Nazis, only 3% of African American adults were registered to vote in the South.

ARABLOUEI: This is Carol Anderson, author of "One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy."

ANDERSON: And the federal government, even if it wanted to, didn't quite have the mechanism to intervene.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Warnings of arrest, threats of jail terms and violence all failed to put out what burns in the hearts and minds of the youngsters.

PRESIDENT LYNDON B JOHNSON: The command of the Constitution is plain. It is wrong - deadly wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.

(APPLAUSE)

ABDELFATAH: On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed the discriminatory voting practices of the Jim Crow era. This was a big deal. The federal government was finally taking a firm stance against voter suppression.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHNSON: At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: We'll hear argument first this morning in case 12-96, Shelby County v. Holder. Mr. Rein...

ARABLOUEI: Fast-forward to 2013. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided that crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts explained the court's decision.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN ROBERTS: I think what we're talking about here is that Congress looks and says, well, we did solve that problem, as everyone agrees. It's been very effective. Section 5 has...

ANDERSON: Roberts ruled that racism wasn't like it was back in the '60s. I mean, I - we have overcome.

ARABLOUEI: Of course, racial discrimination is still a grim reality of voting in America. And Shelby v. Holder only made things worse.

BLIGHT: Voter ID laws have been passed in so many states, you can't count them now. I mean, all these methods the Republicans are using in many, many states - reducing hours of voting, reducing days of early voting, reducing numbers of polls, fighting now over mail-in ballots.

ANDERSON: I mean, we like to treat this kind of disenfranchisement as some kind of relic of the past. No. In the 2018 election, I voted early so that I could drive folk to and from the polls because here in Georgia, they had shut down over 200 polling places and the majority of those in minority and poor communities.

And one of the women that I drove - she was, like, 90. And we go to the polls. And they're, like, how are you doing, Ms. - you know, and they name her - call her name. And she's like, I'm fine. They're, like, we got to see your ID. And she's trying to get, with these 90-year-old fingers, this ID out of her wallet when they know her.

She's able to get it out, and she votes. And we get back in the car. And she's like, mm hmm. I remember when I had to read something when I first tried to vote here in Georgia. And they were asking me all these questions - literacy tests.

And so this woman who had to come through Georgia's literacy tests is now having to deal with Georgia's voter ID laws with a powerful civil rights movement and a Voting Rights Act in between those two moments. We live on the plane of aspiration of what this nation could be, but we're also so aware of how fragile, how tenuous progress is. And that's why we fight.

INSKEEP: A history of barriers to voting from Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei of NPR's history podcast Throughline.

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who Can Vote In The U.S? The Answer Has Changed A Lot Throughout History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Who has a say in American democracy? The answer has changed many times since this country's founding. People of all races and genders can now vote. But over time, barriers have been put in their way. Here are the hosts of NPR's history podcast Throughline, Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why voter suppression continues and how the pandemic has made it worse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The disenfranchisement of voters has been a part of America's history for as long as it's held elections, and this year is no different. A look at the history of voter suppression and what it looks like in a pandemic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
View a PDF of this letter here.

January 19, 2021
SUPPORT H.R. 1, THE FOR THE PEOPLE ACT
Dear Representative:

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 220 national organizations committed to promoting and protecting the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, and the 82 undersigned organizations, we write in strong support of H.R. 1, the For the People Act. We are pleased that the incoming Senate leadership has today announced it intends to introduce this critical bill as S. 1.

The For the People Act represents a transformative vision for American democracy. It would create a democracy that welcomes every eligible voter's chance to participate in civic life and a democracy that demands integrity, fairness, and transparency in our nation's elections. For far too long, voter suppression has been a shameful reality in our country - undercutting the power and representation of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, people with disabilities, Arab Americans, and other communities historically excluded from our political process. The ability to meaningfully participate in our democracy is a racial justice issue. It is a civil rights issue. And the need for legislative action is urgent. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the For the People Act in March 2019, and we are pleased that Speaker Pelosi has committed to making this bill a top priority in the new Congress.

The recent and deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by far-right extremists attempting to overturn the free, fair, and secure 2020 presidential election was a catastrophic reminder of the fragility of our democracy. This violent insurrection did not happen in a vacuum. It was paired with numerous hurdles that voters faced during the pandemic-plagued 2020 election cycle and exacerbated by the relentless efforts by President Trump to undermine election integrity, impose barriers to the ballot box, and discount the votes of communities of color. These experiences reinforce the urgent need to repair our democratic system. The historic voter turnout in the November election despite these challenges demonstrated the determination and resilience of the American people.

Not every flaw in our democracy can be easily fixed, but there are strong and ready solutions to many of the most significant voting rights problems. H.R. 1 would enhance and ensure democracy in America by establishing many critical reforms in federal elections, including:

Ensuring early voting and polling place notice: H.R. 1 would require at least 15 consecutive days of in-person early voting including weekends, for a minimum of 10 hours each day, and ensure that early voting polling places are accessible by public transportation. The bill would also require that voters be given a minimum of seven days' notice if their polling place location is changed.

Safeguarding the right to vote by mail: Sixteen states require voters to provide an excuse as to why they are unable to vote in person on election day in order to receive an absentee ballot. This practice is designed to impede the vote and was particularly galling during the COVID-19 pandemic. H. R. 1 would eliminate such restrictions on the right to vote by mail. The bill would require the prepayment of postage by the government on return envelopes for absentee ballots or voter registration forms.

Reforming voter registration: Nearly 20 percent of people who are eligible but do not vote cite registration hurdles as the main reason for not voting.[1] H. R. 1 would modernize America's voter registration system and improve access to the ballot box by requiring states to establish automatic voter registration ("AVR"), same day registration ("SDR"), and online voter registration for voters across the country, and by ensuring that all voter registration systems are inclusive and accessible for people with disabilities. AVR alone could add an estimated 50 million people to the voter rolls,[2] and SDR increases voter turnout by roughly 10 percent.[3]

Ensuring reasonable wait times to vote: Voters in some states last year were forced to stand in line for more than 10 hours to vote,[4] and recent studies have shown that such barriers occur more frequently in communities of color.[5] H. R. 1 would require states to ensure that voters do not have to wait longer than 30 minutes to cast their ballot at a polling place.

Permitting voting without a photo ID: Between 2010 and 2020, 16 states enacted strict voter identification laws. H. R. 1 requires states to allow registered voters in states with a photo ID requirement to sign a sworn affidavit to vote if they lack a photo ID.

Requiring access to drop boxes: During the 2020 election cycle, some states politicized and limited the use of drop boxes. H.R. 1 would require states to provide secure drop boxes as an option for voters casting absentee ballots.

Restoring voting rights for formerly incarcerated people: H.R. 1 would restore voting rights for people with felony convictions who have finished their sentence, a necessary repudiation of our nation's discriminatory and racially violent past. This would re-enfranchise approximately 4.7 million voters nationwide.[6] Reforming felony disenfranchisement has strong bipartisan support; in 2018, 65 percent of Florida voters cast their ballots to restore the right to vote for over 1.4 million people.

Combating voter purging: H.R. 1 would overturn the Supreme Court's troubling 2018 decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute that allowed Ohio to conduct massive purges from its voter rolls based on non-voting in past elections. Such practices disproportionately target and remove traditionally marginalized people from registration rolls. Voting should not be a "use it or lose it" right.

Prohibiting deceptive practices and voter intimidation: H. R. 1 would ban the distribution of false information about elections to hinder or discourage voting. This provision is particularly important in an era in which Facebook, Twitter, and other digital platforms have been readily manipulated to spread misinformation about elections and voting rights to vulnerable communities. The bill would also increase the criminal penalties for intimidating a voter for the purpose of interfering with their right to vote or causing them to vote for or against a candidate.

Reforming redistricting: H.R. 1 would be a milestone in the battle against the extreme partisan gerrymandering our country has witnessed in recent years, by requiring states to draw congressional districts using independent redistricting commissions that are bipartisan and reflect the demographic diversity of the region. It would establish fair redistricting criteria and safeguard voting rights for communities of color.

Modernizing election administration: H.R. 1 would reauthorize the Election Assistance Commission - an independent, bipartisan commission that plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability and security of voting equipment used in our nation's elections. It would also promote election reliability and security by requiring voter-verified permanent paper ballots and enhanced poll worker recruitment and training. And H.R. 1 would prohibit state election administrators from taking an active part in a political campaign over which they have supervisory authority.

Committing to restoring the Voting Rights Act ("VRA"): H.R. 1 contains a commitment to restoring the landmark VRA and updating its preclearance provision, which is crucial to prevent racial discrimination in the voting process. VRA restoration is being pursued on a separate legislative track that will involve investigatory and evidentiary hearings, thus enabling Congress to update the preclearance coverage formula and develop a full record on the continuing problem of racial discrimination in voting. In 2006, the VRA was reauthorized on a unanimous vote in the Senate and a near-unanimous vote in the House. We need the same type of broad and bipartisan support for restoring the VRA today.

H.R. 1 would also make significant advances in the areas of campaign finance and ethics reform. It would correct the rampant corruption flowing from the corrosive power of money in our elections. It would replace the current campaign finance system that empowers the super-rich and big corporations with one that relies on small donors and public matching funds. It would end secret election spending and force disclosure of all election-related spending. And it would call for a constitutional amendment to overturn the disturbing Citizens United decision that made it impossible to restrict outside spending by corporations or billionaires. In addition, H.R. 1 addresses our government ethics crisis by, among other things, requiring the development of a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices to enhance accountability on ethics and recusal issues; overhauling the Office of Government Ethics to strengthen federal ethics oversight; establishing more robust conflict of interest requirements for government officials; prohibiting members of Congress from using taxpayer dollars to settle allegations of employment discrimination; and requiring presidents to disclose their tax returns.

The For the People Act provides a North Star for the democracy reform agenda. It is a bold, comprehensive reform package that offers solutions to a broken democracy. Repairing and modernizing our voting system goes hand in hand with reforms that address the rampant corruption flowing from the corrosive power of money in our elections, and reforms that address the myriad ethical problems that plague all three branches of the federal government. The reforms in the For the People Act are necessary to advance racial justice and ensure that our government works for all people, not just a powerful few.

Congress must also pass two other essential racial justice and democracy reform bills: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act - which would restore a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court's infamous 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision - and the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would grant long overdue statehood status to the nation's capital.

Shortly before his death last year, Representative Lewis remarked: "In our country, the right to vote is precious - almost sacred. Countless people marched and protested for this right. Some gave a little blood, and far too many lost their lives. Around the globe, generations of U.S. officials boasted of this legacy and progress. Today, the world is horrified in watching Americans - especially people of color - once again stand in immovable lines and experience undeniable, targeted, systematic barriers to democracy.... Time is of the essence to preserve the integrity and promises of our democracy."

Congress and the Biden-Harris administration must heed this call. As the 2020 election cycle and the recent violent assault on the U.S. Capitol made abundantly clear, our democracy is vulnerable and is in dire need of protection. We must enact transformational change to build a democracy that works for everyone. The civil and human rights coalition is strongly committed to expanding the franchise and fixing our democracy, and we urge both chambers of Congress to pass the For the People Act as early as possible in the 117th Congress.

Sincerely,

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
American Federation of Teachers
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)
Andrew Goodman Foundation
Appleseed Network
Arab American Institute
Association of People Supporting Employment First (APSE)
Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Blue Future
BOLD ReThink
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Clearinghouse on Women's Issues
Common Cause
Communications Workers of America
Daily Kos
Declaration for American Democracy
DemCast USA
Democracy 21
Demos
End Citizens United / Let America Vote Action Fund
Equal Justice Society
Equality California
Faith In Public Life
Family Equality
Feminist Majority Foundation
GLSEN
Government Accountability Project
Impact Fund
In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda
Iota Phi Lambda Sorority Inc., Psi Chapter
Iota Phi Lambda Sorority-Epsilon Phi
Iota Phi Lambda Sorority, Inc.
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement
Japanese American Citizens League
Justice for Migrant Women
Justice in Aging
Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice
Lambda Legal
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
League of Women Voters of the US
Missouri Voter Protection Coalition
MomsRising
NAACP
National Action Network
National Association of Human Rights Workers
National Association of Social Workers
National CAPACD- National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development
National Center for Law and Economic Justice
National Center for Lesbian Rights
National Council of Jewish Women
National Education Association
National Employment Law Project
National Equality Action Team (NEAT)
National Homelessness Law Center
National Organization for Women
National Partnership for Women & Families
National Women Of Achievement, Incorporated
National Workrights Institute
Oxfam America
Patriotic Millionaires
People For the American Way
People's Parity Project
PFLAG National
Prison Policy Initiative
Progressive Turnout Project
Public Citizen
Public Justice
Rock the Vote
SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center
Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF)
Silver State Equality-Nevada
Texas Progressive Action Network
The United Methodist Church - General Board of Church and Society
True North Research
UnidosUS
URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity
Vote.org
When We All Vote
Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice
Women Lawyers On Guard Action Network, Inc.

[1]https://cha.house.gov/sites/democrats.cha.house.gov/files/documents/committee_docs/Chiraag_Bains_testimony_HR1.pdf.

[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/case-automatic-voter-registration,

[3] https://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Sdr-Factsheet-Final_1.pdf.

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/13/more-than-10-hour-wait-and-long-lines-as-early-voting-starts-in-georgia.

[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smartphone-data-show-voters-in-black-neighborhoods-wait-longer1/.

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/07/6-million-citizens-including-1-in-13-african-americans-are-blocked-from-voting-because-of-felonies/?utm_term=.be285eb259ee.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Support H.R. 1, the For the People Act - The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View a PDF of this letter here. January 19, 2021 SUPPORT H.R. 1, THE FOR THE PEOPLE ACT Dear Representative: On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Hum­­­­an Rights, a coalition of more than 220 national organizations committed to promoting and protecting the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, and the 82 undersigned organizations, we write in strong support of H.R.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
More than 10,000 people who Ohio believed had "abandoned" their voter registration cast ballots in the 2020 election, raising more concern that officials are using an unreliable and inaccurate method to identify ineligible voters on the state's rolls.

In August, Ohio's Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, released a list of 115,816 people who were set to be purged after the November election because the election officials in each of Ohio's 88 counties flagged them as inactive. Voters could remove their name from the list by taking a number of election-related actions, including voting, requesting an absentee ballot, or simply confirming their voter registration information.

Last week, LaRose's office announced that nearly 18,000 people on the initial list did not have their voter registration canceled, including 10,000 people who voted in the November election. About 98,000 registrations were ultimately removed from the state's rolls, LaRose's office announced last month. There are more than 8 million registered voters in the state.

In a statement, LaRose said the fact that so many people prevented their voter registrations from being canceled is a success of the state's unprecedented efforts to notify voters at risk of being purged. But voting rights groups say the fact that Ohio nearly purged thousands of eligible voters is deeply alarming and underscores the inaccurate and haphazard way the state goes about maintaining its voter rolls.

"If we have 10,000 people who on their own volition are voting, we know that there's probably many more who are still living, breathing, eligible Ohioans, who also have not moved, who also have been removed from the rolls," said Jen Miller, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Federal law requires states to regularly review their voter lists for ineligible voters, but Ohio has one of the most aggressive processes for cancelling registrations in the United States. A voter can be removed from the rolls if they don't vote or undertake any political activity for six consecutive years and fail to respond to a mailer asking to confirm their address after the first two.

Voting advocates argue Ohio's process essentially removes people from the rolls because they don't vote, which is prohibited under federal law, and is more likely to target minorities and the poor. The US supreme court upheld the Ohio process in a 5-4 decision in 2018.

Naila Awan, a lawyer at Demos, a civil rights thinktank that helped challenge the Ohio process at the US supreme court, said she wasn't surprised that eligible voters were flagged on the August list of people at risk of being purged.

"Voting inactivity is a really poor proxy for identifying individuals who may have become ineligible by reason of having moved. The data across the board shows that this is fundamentally a flawed process and there has to be something better to use," she said.

The recent purge marks the second time in recent memory that Ohio has nearly purged scores of eligible voters from its rolls. Months ahead of a scheduled purge in 2019, the state released a list of 235,000 people who were set to be removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups found more than 40,000 eligible voters included on it and were able to prevent them from being removed.

Democratic and Republican officials alike have overseen purging for years in Ohio, but a 2016 Reuters analysis illustrated the way the practice can disproportionally hurt Democrats. In the state's three largest counties, voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods were struck from the rolls at twice the rate of those in GOP areas, the analysis found. In heavily Black areas of Cincinnati, more than 10% of voters were removed from the rolls between 2012 and 2016 because of inactivity, compared with just 4% in one of the city's suburbs.

In the months before the 2020 election, Keizayla Fambro, an organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that focuses on empowering people of color in the state, was focused on voter registration in counties that are home to some of Ohio's biggest cities. She estimated her group encountered one to two people a week who were on the purge list and whom they urged to update their voter registration.

"We would check them on a name and we would be like, 'Oh my God, your voter registration needs to be updated, you could have been purged,'" she said. "Honestly, it was coincidence."

For those who move a lot, updating a voter registration was often the last thing they were thinking about, Fambro said. "You're thinking about, 'Oh, I have to get my kid in this school. I have to make sure we have somewhere to sleep,'" she said.

People of color, the poor, non-English speakers and minorities also tend to experience more severe barriers in getting to the polls, making them more likely to be flagged for purging under a system that relies on inactivity, Awan said.

A poll worker sits outside and assists voters at a polling station in Columbus, Ohio, in November. Photograph: Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images

"When you're using something like the number of elections a person has missed, you're going to, by necessity almost, be disproportionately targeting people who experience more barriers getting to the polling locations to begin with," she said.

Miller and other voting advocates have praised LaRose for taking the unprecedented step of making the purge list public months ahead of the removals to give voters adequate time to check their voter registration. But simply making the list public isn't adequate, they say, especially because the increased transparency has underscored the way Ohio's process can flag eligible voters for potential cancellation.

"Before LaRose, we didn't have any transparency, so we appreciate that. But what the transparency is doing is actually confirming that there are a lot of living, breathing Ohioans who are getting wrapped up in this process who shouldn't be," Miller said.

"It's been frustrating because to me he's gotten this false praise of, 'Oh, he opened up the list for the first time,' which is all fine and dandy. To me, opening up, being transparent, doesn't mean anything if you don't have accountability," said Bride Rose Sweeney, a Democrat in the Ohio state house of representatives.

LaRose has called for more reform, focusing on centralizing and updating Ohio's voter registration system. He has backed adopting automatic voter registration, which would help prevent wrongful purging by requiring state agencies to automatically update voter registration when they interact with eligible voters. Currently, counties are responsible for maintaining their voter rolls and compiling lists of people eligible to be purged, a system LaRose told USA Today last year was "prone to error" and "unacceptably messy".

"The secretary believes there are improvements to be made to the process. I certainly hope you include them in your story," Maggie Sheehan, a LaRose spokeswoman, told the Guardian.

Some changes are already in place. While the state used to only send voters one notice asking them to confirm their voter registration records, it recently started sending a second, final confirmation notice 30-45 days before the purge takes place. The state also announced in 2018 that voters at risk of being purged could confirm their addresses when they updated their driver's licenses.

But the fact that Ohio flagged so many eligible voters for removal despite those reforms is still alarming, said Stuart Naifeh, another Demos lawyer involved in the 2018 supreme court case.

LaRose has insisted the purge process is outlined in state law, limiting any changes he can make. But advocates dispute that characterization, noting that LaRose has the authority to improve the process. State law does require officials to remove anyone who receives a confirmation mailer and doesn't vote for four consecutive years from the rolls, but it doesn't specify what triggers the confirmation notice. By relying on more reliable evidence that someone has moved, instead of two years of voting inactivity, LaRose could significantly improve the accuracy of the purge process, critics say.

"He is not required by law to do this ... State law allows it, it's not barred," said Sweeney, the Ohio state representative. "He is choosing to make this a more expansive process."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ohio nearly purged 10,000 voters who ended up casting 2020 ballots

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
More than 10,000 people who Ohio believed had "abandoned" their voter registration cast ballots in the 2020 election, raising more concern that officials are using an unreliable and inaccurate method to identify ineligible voters on the state's rolls.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With concerns over the Postal Service's ability to deliver mail-in ballots on time, drop boxes are the rage. Ohio limits the boxes to one per county - even in counties with millions of residents.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

How will mail-in ballots be collected and counted this fall? Problems with the U.S. Postal Service raised questions about mail delivery. To address that, some states are deploying drop boxes for ballots. But in Ohio, there are limits on drop boxes, which are leading to charges of voter suppression. Ohio Public Radio's Jo Ingles reports.

JO INGLES, BYLINE: While drop boxes for ballots are relatively new in Ohio, they are common across the country. Lawrence Norden studies voting trends for the New York-based Brennan Center.

LAWRENCE NORDEN: Thirty-nine states and Washington, D.C., will use drop boxes this fall. In states like Colorado or Washington state that have had high numbers of mail voting for a long time, they're extremely common. And in fact, while we often talk about those states as being mail voting states, most people don't mail their ballots back. They drop them off in places like drop boxes.

INGLES: I'm standing here at the ballot drop box at the Delaware County Board of Elections. This suburban Columbus county is one of the wealthiest in the state, reliably conservative. The board of elections is housed in modest offices inside a strip mall that's anchored by a Big Lots store. And this drop box is behind the building next to the dumpsters.

MINDY HEDGES: I decided to do a drop box instead of putting it in the mail.

INGLES: That's Delaware County voter Mindy Hedges (ph) who plans to use this drop box for her paper ballot this election.

HEDGES: But the problem is there's only one drop box in Delaware County and in every county, and that creates a big issue, not necessarily for me. Thankfully, I have a car, but a lot of people don't.

INGLES: Denise Driehaus is a member of the Hamilton County Board of Elections near Cincinnati. She says even if voters have cars to get to that county's one drop box, there are still problems.

DENISE DRIEHAUS: There's always a line that wraps around the building, both to drop the ballots but also the early voting. And so it gets so congested in the parking lot, in the streets that are surrounding the board of elections. It's just a mess.

INGLES: And a mess is what voting rights activists fear. Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose installed one drop box at each county board of elections before the April primary to help manage the expected surge of mail-in ballots. But that's still one drop box per county, even ones with more than a million residents. Activists accuse LaRose of sending mixed signals. He first said he wanted more drop boxes but couldn't add them without legislative approval. The state's Democratic Party sued. And early this month, a court ruled the state could and should add more drop boxes. But rather than do that, Frank LaRose appealed that order.

And now that you've got a court who says, yeah, you can go ahead and put those drop boxes in, you know, why not go ahead and do it? You said you wanted them.

FRANK LAROSE: Yeah, not going to get into the sort of ongoing legal wrangling, but this one decision is not the sum total of the legal process. And we've got to allow everything to play out that's going to play out.

INGLES: Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper wants the secretary of state to order more drop boxes now before voting begins in a couple of weeks.

DAVID PEPPER: This is a box. This isn't sending a rocket to the moon. It's a box. In the primary, they set up boxes all over this state on a very short timeframe.

INGLES: There's another lawsuit in federal court. At this point, nearly 2 million Ohioans have requested mail-in ballots, on pace to set a new record. Whether voters will have to return them by mail or have a convenient drop box to put them in is still very much an open question here. For NPR News, I'm Jo Ingles in Columbus.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAVES OF STEEL'S "MY FUTURE IS BRIGHT")

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ohio's Ballot Drop Box Limits Lead To Allegations Of Voter Suppression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With concerns over the Postal Service's ability to deliver mail-in ballots on time, drop boxes are the rage. Ohio limits the boxes to one per county - even in counties with millions of residents. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: How will mail-in ballots be collected and counted this fall? Problems with the U.S.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Elephant in the room, intentional voter suppression

# data[].attributes.subject
The Elephant in the room, intentional voter suppression

# data[].attributes.body
By: Lisa Marshall Manheim, Elizabeth G. Porter | The Supreme Court review | 2019

# data[].attributes.headline
Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes

# data[].attributes.subject
Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes

# data[].attributes.headline
Voter ID Laws: The Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters?

# data[].attributes.subject
Voter ID Laws: The Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Voter ID Laws: The Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Click on the article title to read more.

# data[].attributes.headline
Legacies of Segregation and Disenfranchisement: The Road from Plessy to Frank and Voter ID Laws in the United States

# data[].attributes.subject
Legacies of Segregation and Disenfranchisement: The Road from Plessy to Frank and Voter ID Laws in the United States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Legacies of Segregation and Disenfranchisement: The Road from Plessy to Frank and Voter ID Laws in the United States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article explores how voter ID laws further the dismantling of voting rights and the promises of full political engagement for racial minorities, especially African Americans. The authors highlight the racial politics that inform the emergence of these laws, and the racial intent and impact these laws have in diluting minority voting access and therefore political power.

# data[].attributes.headline
Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S.

# data[].attributes.subject
Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2016, some of Donald Trump's armed supporters were observed "menacing" a Democratic Party campaign office; during the same election, a Republican campaign office was firebombed (Rosza Reference Rosza2016). Though rare today, electoral violence was once widespread in the United States, and remains so in a number of democracies. Attempts to restrict voting are not unusual, but in consolidated democracies voter suppression is seldom violent. Why? We examine why approaches to voter suppression vary, and why it appears to evolve from violent to non-violent. To illustrate our arguments, we examine a critical transitional period in voter suppression in the post-Reconstruction American South: the shift from decentralized violence and intimidation to institutionalized means of disenfranchising blacks. We also place recent suppression efforts into this broader historical and theoretical context.

Fundamentally, political competition-in modern democracies this almost always means party competition-drives voter suppression. Yet suppression is not ubiquitous, reflecting its varying costs and benefits. Similarly, the form that suppression takes (our main focus) varies considerably. We argue that when suppression is desired, but would-be suppressors are unable to enact and implement laws to accomplish this from a lack of political and state capacity or from external actors making the enactment of suppression laws prohibitively costly, then we will see ad hoc, decentralized, and sometimes violent voter suppression. But decentralized violence has high reputational costs, is less effective, and can itself undermine state power. Therefore, as political and state capacity increase and external constraints recede, voter suppression will generally shift from being decentralized, ad hoc, and sometimes violent to centralized, (mostly) non-violent approaches.

Our arguments are general to democracies, but we illustrate and test our argument with qualitative and quantitative analysis of the suppression of black voting in the post-Reconstruction American South. The intense party competition of the era led to voter suppression by state political parties and governments on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and calculations about electoral outcomes shaped the willingness of federal Republicans to intervene in defense of black voting rights. In the South, voter suppression was driven by the fact that blacks were numerous enough to threaten white, Democratic control of government ... if they voted. Initially, however, Southern Democrats lacked the internal capacity to enact and implement voter suppression policies and, even after this capacity was achieved, federal (Republican) intervention-or the threat thereof-protected black suffrage. Therefore, voter suppression was decentralized, ad hoc and violent, directed by elites within the Democratic Party, and carried out by elites and the rank and file. After Democrats consolidated control over state governments, state capacity increased, and federal Republicans largely abandoned black voting rights, Southern states shifted to using laws to suppress black voting, due to the reputational costs and relative ineffectiveness of violence. We examine whether law (largely) replaced violence to suppress voting during this period.

Systematically measuring electoral violence is difficult, but reliable data on lynchings exists. The social science literature is skeptical on whether lynchings were used to suppress voting, but astute contemporary observers noted this link (Johnson Reference Johnson1924; Wells 1900; see also Ortiz Reference Ortiz2006). Here, we take advantage of a larger dataset and finer-grained temporal variation in the "threat" of black voting, and importance of violence to suppress it, to examine the link between lynchings (which we view also as a proxy for more common forms of electoral violence) and voter suppression. We find that before Jim Crow disenfranchisement more lynchings occurred in areas of Populist Party strength and as elections approached. Under Jim Crow, lynchings declined overall and the link between electoral factors and lynchings was severed. Centralized law mostly replaced decentralized violence.

Understanding voter suppression's evolution during this period is important in its own right. The roll back of black (male) voting rights is one of the largest disenfranchisement of voters in history (Gibson Reference Gibson2013), with effects-both domestic and international-that reverberated for over a century, shaping the American state's development and policy outcomes for decades and contributing to the creation of the "Solid South" (Borstelmann Reference Borstelmann2009; Francis Reference Francis2014; Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder Reference Katznelson, Geiger and Kryder1993; Rohde Reference Rohde1991). But our framework also helps us understand current attempts to restrict voting. Due to earlier federal interventions, the forms of legalized suppression used after Reconstruction are no longer permissible. Yet in recent years we see growing attempts to restrict voting by blacks and other groups (e.g. college students, immigrants). We place these attempts in broader historical and theoretical context using our framework.

The Whys and Hows of Voter Suppression

Political elites engage in many types of electoral manipulation (Svolik and Chernykh Reference Svolik and Chernykh2014). One approach is to interfere with the exercise of the legal right to vote. Though possible in non-party systems because parties are central to political competition in modern democracies, in practice party competition drives voter suppression. Parties value holding office for its own sake, but also to achieve other material and policy goals (Aldrich Reference Aldrich1995). This desire to hold office leads parties to mobilize their supporters, and sometimes demobilize their opponents.

Not all parties attempt to restrict voting, reflecting suppression's varying costs and benefits. If parties believe they will easily win free and fair elections, there is no reason to suppress the vote, especially since keeping electoral practices clean has benefits in terms of perceived legitimacy (Hafner-Burton, Hyde, and Jablonski Reference Hafner-Burton, Hyde and Jablonski2014; Rozenas Reference Rozenas2016). The "legitimacy cost" of voter suppression is problematic if internal opposition groups are strong enough to capitalize on it, or if elites are reliant on external actors for support. While state governments have primary responsibility for determining voting procedures in the United States, the federal government nonetheless acts as an external constraint, via the creation and enforcement of laws related to voting rights. Therefore, the federal stance toward voting rights is important. In most countries-even many federal states-there is no similar system, but external entities (e.g., the European Union) can potentially impose constraints.

Voter suppression is sometimes pursued despite these potential costs and constraints, because suppression has large potential benefits. Numerically larger out-groups present larger threats, since voting systems provide more power to larger groups, but if elections are closely divided, then suppressing the vote of smaller groups becomes attractive (Blalock Reference Blalock1967). Voter suppression will also be more likely when groups competing for power have large policy preference gaps because this raises the benefits (costs) of winning (losing) elections.

Our focus is on understanding why parties choose among different means of voter suppression. For our purposes, suppression can be placed into two categories: ad-hoc, extra-legal, and decentralized versus institutionalized, legal, and centralized. The former is more likely to employ intimidation and violence (e.g., contemporary terror attacks at polling places). Jim Crow voting restrictions are paradigmatic examples of the centralized, institutionalized approach. Why do actors choose among different approaches to suppression? Centralized, institutionalized approaches require law-making majorities in favor of suppression, which we call political capacity. Centralized suppression also requires a relatively knowledgeable and well-developed bureaucracy-state capacity-to craft and implement effective laws (Skocpol and Finegold Reference Skocpol and Finegold1982). For instance, using poll taxes to suppress only certain voters requires information on who can pay and institutions capable of record-keeping and processing payments. Thus, only parties with reasonable political and state capacity can engage in institutionalized, centralized suppression.

Especially in a federal system like the United States, external constraints also matter. Enacting formal laws repealing voting rights can invite external intervention. Nation-states may face similar constraints to the degree that they are part of supra- or international organizations or are reliant on outside actors for resources. These internal and external constraints interact, and internal actors actively attempt to influence external actors to use their power to allow or prevent voter suppression as they desire. Thus, due to internal and external constraints, not all elites are capable of creating and implementing effective legislative, bureaucratically-implemented voter suppression schemes. Where suppression has substantial benefits to a party or faction it may still occur, but it will necessarily be ad hoc and decentralized.

One benefit of decentralized suppression is plausible deniability, minimizing reputational costs. However, even ad hoc approaches often convey to observers which groups are responsible for suppression, since political opponents, journalists, and NGOs monitor elections for precisely these types of activities. Furthermore, if extra-legal suppression becomes violent there are substantial reputational risks for suppressors, increasing the costs of suppression. In addition, extra-legal approaches to suppression are less predictably effective since they rely on semi-autonomous actors for implementation, who must overcome both collective action costs to organize and transaction costs related to information, monitoring, and sanctioning. Decentralized ad hoc suppression, especially if it turns violent, also risks further undermining the power of the state by demonstrating its inability to maintain order (Johnson Reference Johnson2010).

Institutionalized forms of voter suppression have several benefits opposite the aforementioned costs of extra-legal suppression. First, people are generally compliant with laws benefiting their group, even those imposing costs, if they expect compliance by others (Levi Reference Levi1997). Not only do laws induce cooperation by threatening sanctions for their violation, they further induce cooperation by affecting expectations about others' behaviors and the pay-offs of different strategies (McAdams Reference McAdams2000). Second, though even voting laws implemented by formal bureaucracies leave some room for discretion in enforcement, formal laws are more predictably implemented and therefore have more predictable effects (Bishop Reference Bishop1892; Atkeson et al. Reference Atkeson, Bryant, Hall, Saunders and Alvarez2010). Being able to reasonably predict the extent of voter suppression is important for politicians strategic about where to campaign and direct their resources. Third, legal restrictions are less likely to produce violence, which imposes reputational costs on regimes. Finally, once it is harder for certain groups to vote, opposition parties that might find a natural constituency in marginalized groups will spend less time appealing to and mobilizing these groups' members. Formalized policies thus have characteristics of self-enforcing institutions, which ad hoc voter suppression lacks.

There are downsides to using formal laws to suppress voting. As Perman (2003) notes, formal laws tie the violation of democratic norms and rights very directly to a particular regime, damaging its reputation. Elites attempt to avoid this by writing restrictions to appear neutral to different groups and in the service of acceptable goals, like preventing voter fraud. Furthermore, to the extent that internal and external audiences are unconcerned, legitimacy costs are minimized. Overall, then, institutionalized voter suppression is generally preferable. This means that when internal political and state capacity increase and external constraints decrease we should see a shift from ad hoc, decentralized, and violent voter suppression to centralized, non-violent approaches, which we discuss further in the context of the U.S. South.

Evolving Voter Suppression in the South after Reconstruction

To be readmitted to the Union, Southern states had to rewrite their constitutions and ensure the rights guaranteed to blacks in the U.S. Constitution and federal enforcement statues, including suffrage for black males. White Democratic Party leaders in the South wanted to reinstitute control over black citizens. But this would require substantial policy changes from the Reconstruction-era status quo, and was virtually impossible as long as many blacks voted because, even in areas lacking black majorities, blacks could be pivotal to election outcomes (Foner Reference Foner1993; Perman 2003).

Almost immediately after blacks won the right to vote, white Southern Democrats began trying to reverse black suffrage (Redding Reference Redding2010). There was nothing unique about the South that led to voter suppression in this era. Due to intense party competition governments throughout the country engaged in suppression, and federal officials weighing intervention considered how voter suppression in the states would affect their electoral fortunes, as we will discuss. Republicans wanted to expand voting by their supporters, including Southern blacks, but many Republican-controlled state governments in the North enacted laws like literacy tests and poll taxes, aimed at recent immigrants who supported the Democratic Party (Keyssar Reference Keyssar2009). Party competition can drive both expansions of voting and voter suppression (Ansell and Samuels Reference Ansell and Samuels2014; Valelly Reference Valelly1993).

In contrast with the North, however, violence was central to suppressing black voting in the South. As Key (1949, 536) notes, "force and the threat of force had put the whites in power." What can explain the use of violence in the South, rather than the institutionalized approaches in the North? Though some argue that a particularly violent culture led to the use of violence (Cash et al. Reference Cash1941), rapid changes in levels of violence over short periods of time cast doubt on this. A violent culture may facilitate, but variation in the use of violence, both in the South compared to the North and in the South over time, is better explained by our internal and external constraints framework.

In the late 1860s some Southern states did attempt to enact laws restricting black suffrage, but these were overturned by federal legislation and enforcement of voting rights because Republicans controlling the federal government wanted to develop a national party to consolidate the political victories of the Civil War; this would require black votes in the South (Valelly 2009a). While Republicans wanted to compete in the South and stationed federal troops there to enforce voting rights, Southern states could not implement legal, institutionalized forms of suppression (Perman 2003). Internal factors also limited the enactment of voter suppression laws. Because of the Republican Party's efforts (both via official government institutions and party organization), many blacks and white Republicans supportive of black suffrage held power in Southern governments, limiting the political capacity of Democrats to enact laws (Foner Reference Foner1993). Second, even once Democrats regained control of government, implementing effective laws was difficult due to the relative lack of state capacity after the Civil War (Herron Reference Herron2017; Hyman Reference Hyman1989).

Given these constraints, decentralized violence and intimidation quickly became the preferred means of voter suppression, often initiated by Democratic Party leaders, with the support of average white Southerners (Brundage Reference Brundage1993; Foner 2014; Mickey Reference Mickey2015). For example, the "Edgefield Plan" in South Carolina, written by former Confederate General Martin W. Gary, laid out a scheme to organize citizen militias to ensure white Democrats suppressed black participation. Decentralized and violent, it read, in part: "Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine, how he may best accomplish it."

Though the Democrats had generally regained power in Southern governments by 1877, concerns that white competitors and blacks could ally and threaten their control remained (Perman Reference Perman1985). Thus, violence was used to suppress black voting and drive Republicans from office (Gibson Reference Gibson2013; Rushdy Reference Rushdy2012). Voter turnout declined dramatically for whites and blacks over two decades, but Redding and James ( Reference Redding and James2001) show that black turnout declined much more dramatically than white. Nevertheless, violence was only partly effective in suppressing black voting. In 1892, fifteen years after federal troops largely left the South, the black turnout rate remained roughly 50% in some Southern states. As Redding ( Reference Redding2010) notes when comparing North Carolina to the rest of the South, "violence and fraud had turned out to be effective elsewhere, but involved collective action mobilization and tended to only work as a temporary fix." Relying on whites to feel "honor bound" to suppress black voting and decentralized actors to coordinate voter suppression was never going to be entirely effective, particularly as long as some blacks heroically risked life and limb to continue to vote (Kousser Reference Morgan1974, 14). As John Lynch, the last black Congressman from Mississippi until the 1980s, told the House in 1882, black voters in the South "have bravely refused to surrender their honest convictions, even upon the altar of their personal necessities."

Furthermore, violence-especially lynchings-troubled some Southern and many Northern elites (Francis Reference Francis2014; Kato Reference Kato2015; Mickey Reference Mickey2015). The inability to prevent "excessive" violence resulted from and vividly highlighted the weak state capacity of the South (Johnson Reference Johnson2010). While violence persisted, Southern leaders feared that the federal government might reoccupy the South to monitor elections (Valelly 2009a; Gibson Reference Gibson2013). In sum, ad hoc violent voter suppression was used due to internal and external constraints on "legal" approaches, but was only partly effective and had serious reputational costs. This led Southern Democrats to search for a centralized, institutionalized, and non-violent means of suppression (Kousser 1999). For example, at the Alabama Democratic convention in 1900, one delegate stated that "we have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods, but in the future we'll disfranchise them by law." The pursuit of legalized voter suppression by Southern Democrats only became possible once violence had been successful enough to put Democrats back in power, Southern state governments (re)developed electoral institutions, and national Republicans abandoned black voters (Brandwein Reference Brandwein2011; Mickey Reference Mickey2015; Kato 2016). Internal capacities and external constraints interacted to shape the form of suppression, and the ensuing shift toward law made possible by the removal of internal and external constraints.

The suppression of Republican voting and the removal of a sufficient number of black and white Republicans from office through violence and intimidation meant that white Democratic "Redeemers" controlled law-making institutions in most Southern states by the late 1870s. Despite this, Southern states did not necessarily have the capacity to implement voter suppression laws. Herron ( Reference Herron2017) details how a primary goal of Redeemer governments upon assuming power was cutting funding for or eliminating institutions created or expanded by Republican governments. This state retrenchment limited state capacity. Furthermore, before they could effectively disenfranchise blacks, election oversight institutions also needed to be reconfigured along the lines of Democratic preferences after being controlled by Republicans during Reconstruction. Over time, state capacity and control over election administration institutions increased, and Southern Democratic governments had a growing ability to create and implement effective voter suppression laws (Key Reference Key1949; Johnson Reference Johnson2010).

Yet, as long as Republicans attempted to compete in the South, which required black votes, federal intervention in Southern elections was a possibility (Brandwein Reference Brandwein2011). Records from post-Reconstruction state constitutional conventions illustrate that Southern governments were concerned about federal intervention if legal disenfranchisement was aggressively pursued (Brandwein Reference Brandwein2011; Herron Reference Herron2017). The defeat of the Lodge Elections Bill in 1890, which would have allowed for federal judicial oversight of registration and voting in congressional elections, was a sign of wavering Republican commitment to black voting rights. But this bill did not fail due to an opposition to black voting rights per se, and in the next couple of election cycles some leaders of the Republican Party thought that competing in the South remained important (Valelly 2009b).

This commitment to competing in the South and black voting rights did not last too much longer, however. Due to significant defeats in the 1890 and 1892 elections, along with deaths and retirements, very few Republicans who had engaged in the early fights over suffrage and were committed to building the party in the South remained in Congress. As Kousser ( Reference Morgan1974, 31) notes, the "old guard" was replaced by "younger men to whom abolition and Reconstruction seemed irrelevant, merely picturesque, or even evil." The electorate had tired of sectional fights by the 1890s and new Republican leaders were more committed to the promotion of business as a way to build a national party (Brandwein Reference Brandwein2011). And once this approach was at least partly vindicated by winning unified government in the election of 1896 without being competitive in the South, black voting rights were abandoned (Gibson Reference Gibson2013; Valelly 2009a). Indeed, in 1894 Republicans won one of the then-largest Congressional victories in history, taking over 70% of the House and more than doubling their previous seat share; in 1896 Republican McKinley won the presidency in a landslide. These overwhelming Republican majorities did not attempt to reverse the Democrats' 1894 undoing of some federal election statutes, and in 1896 the GOP removed from its platform a plank calling for free and fair elections in the South (Kousser Reference Morgan1974; Mickey Reference Mickey2015).

The first laws limiting black voting had a limited reach, for instance disenfranchising those convicted of a crime. As Valelly (2009a, 130) explains, legal disenfranchisement was "a process ... its backers could not and did not do all of what they wanted right away." Once it became clear that the federal government would not intervene in Southern elections, however, broader laws eliminating black suffrage were enacted (Kousser Reference Morgan1974; Brandwein Reference Brandwein2011). Compared to decentralized violence, these broader suffrage restrictions were very effective. In Louisiana in 1896, over 130,000 blacks were registered to vote; by 1904, after the enactment of several restrictions on voting, only 1,342 black voters were registered. A contemporary Congressional report stated that violence was "no longer necessary because the laws are so framed that the Democrats can keep themselves in possession of the governments in every Southern State."

Jim Crow 2.0 and the Continuing Evolution of Suppression

Bentele and O'Brien ( Reference Bentele and O'Brien.2013) refer to recent attempts to restrict voting as "Jim Crow 2.0." Using seemingly neutral policies such as voter identification laws to discriminate against minorities, the poor, and the young is certainly consistent with the original Jim Crow laws. In light of our arguments and findings, why are these laws being enacted now and why are they taking the form that they are?

As before, the desire to win elections by political party organizations motivates attempts to restrict the vote. Voter restrictions are increasing as partisan control of Congress (and the presidency) is more variable than it has been for decades. And of course state-level electoral calculations matter: research shows that restrictive voting laws are most likely when control of government has recently shifted to the Republican Party, indicating that these states were competitive in the recent past (Biggers and Hanmer Reference Biggers and Hanmer2017; McKee Reference McKee2015; Rocha and Matsubayashi Reference Rocha and Matsubayashi.2014). Despite long having large minority populations, voting restrictions have expanded recently in many Southern states because Republicans gained unified control of state government for the first time in decades in the early 2000s. As in 1890, state governments are using law to suppress voting to consolidate their control after obtaining power.

As with Jim Crow 1.0, these laws target minorities (Bentele and O'Brien Reference Bentele and O'Brien.2013). Though technically neutral with regard to race/ethnicity, class, and age there is little doubt about the intended targets. One former Republican staffer in Wisconsin described legislators as "giddy" at the prospect of disenfranchising youth and minority voters, and Pennsylvania's House majority leader said his state's identification law would ensure Romney's victory in the state in 2012 (Wines Reference Wines2016). The high degree of capacity that exists in all U.S. states at this time allows policymakers to very effectively target minorities for suppression. For example, detailed data collection enabled North Carolina Republicans to restrict voting in the times, places, and manner most likely to be utilized by African Americans (Ingraham Reference Ingraham2016). It is attractive for the Republican Party to suppress minority voting because minorities' growing loyalty to the Democratic Party. As during Reconstruction, black voters demonstrate tremendous loyalty to one party, and Latinos have shifted strongly toward the Democratic Party in recent years (Lopez et al. Reference Lopez, Gonzalez-Barrera, Krogstadt and Lopez2014). In contrast, in states where they hold power, Democrats draw support from a more diverse coalition, making targeting particular voters for suppression unattractive.

External constraints on the states have also recently decreased. Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more willing to allow states to restrict the voting of Democratic constituencies so that Republicans will win. With Republican judges in place and more frequent control of the institutions of government, federal Republicans can prevent Democrats from taking steps to ensure voting rights. Republican appointees to the Supreme Court weakened and then struck down key portions of the Voting Rights Act, making it is easier for states to restrict voting because new voting laws no longer needed preclearance by federal judges (Liptak Reference Liptak2013, McCrary Reference McCrary, Seaman and Valelly2005). In the wake of this decision, several Republican-controlled states promptly enacted restrictive voting laws, and Republican Congresses have refused to enact a revised Voting Rights Act. Thus, with the combination of internal capacities and lack of external constraints we can see why, despite occasional invocations otherwise, we continue to see the overwhelming use of institutionalized rather than decentralized, ad hoc approaches to voter suppression, and electoral violence is exceedingly rare.

Conclusion

Driven by a fundamental desire to win elections, the same basic considerations of costs and benefits shape decisions by competing elites regarding suppression now as in previous eras. How suppression occurs depends on internal conditions and external constraints. Ad hoc and often violent suppression is more likely when internal political or state capacity to implement formal legal techniques is lacking, and when external actors present constraints. When internal capacities increase and external constraints decrease, elites will choose legislative, centralized, typically non-violent approaches to suppression.

Thus, in affluent democracies like the United States we have seen a shift from ad hoc, decentralized, and often violent voter suppression toward centralized, legal, and non-violent approaches. We illustrate this shift with the use, and then relative abandonment, of one form of violence-lynching-in the suppression of black voting after Reconstruction. Immediately after federal troops left the South, lynching and other forms of violence were tools in the widespread suppression of black political participation. The use of violence reflected both a lack of political and state capacity and the federal stance as guarantor of black voting rights. Once internal capacities were present and external constraints were removed, Southern Democrats shifted to centralized, bureaucratically-implemented voter suppression, which reduced political lynchings. We showed that our arguments can adequately describe the evolution of voter suppression in the post-Reconstruction South, but we also think that our arguments would apply in other systems and at other times and places in the United States. Of course, further research should examine this directly.

Our argument and findings also illuminate current attempts to restrict the vote. Due to earlier federal interventions, the sweeping disenfranchisement of Jim Crow is no longer permissible. Nonetheless, attempts to restrict voting by blacks and other groups have increased in recent years. Like the post-Reconstruction South, partisan calculations about how voting by different groups affects election victories drive attempts at suppression. Approaches have been institutionalized because modern U.S. state governments have significant state capacity, thus where Republicans have the political capacity they have often enacted restrictive voting laws. The national Republican Party is content to allow more voter suppression because the targeted groups support the Democratic Party. Despite occasional calls to violence and intimidation, even by some prominent candidates, in general there has been no return of widespread electoral violence accompanying the new round of voter restrictions. This does not mean that the return of widespread violence is impossible, but it does seem highly unlikely based on the historical trajectory of voter suppression toward centralized, institutionalized approaches.

One major difference with the post-Reconstruction era is that, given the Voting Rights Act and other federal laws that are weakened but still in place, these recent restrictions on voting are neither as extreme nor as effective in suppressing voting. In fact, it remains unclear whether they effectively reduce voting at all (Rocha and Matsubayashi Reference Rocha and Matsubayashi.2014; Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson Reference Hajnal, Lajevardi and Nielson2017). Even their critics must acknowledge that laws like voter identification requirements have limited potential for suppression due to the simple fact that the vast majority of all Americans have identification. Yet it remains unclear the degree to which such requirements interact with restrictions on registration and early and absentee voting, and it should not be assumed that more egregious attempts to deny the voting rights of larger numbers of people will not be pursued by states in the future. Perhaps it is the case that the widespread disenfranchisement of certain groups of Americans via law is no longer possible. Yet Jim Crow 1.0 started with relatively modest laws, designed to appear neutral, that restricted the voting of relatively few individuals, which then expanded to disenfranchise larger numbers of voters. Even though it is unlikely that modern states, with their considerable political and state capacity, would need to use violence to restrict voting, is it impossible to imagine that broader laws disenfranchising more voters will be enacted?

Supplemental Materials

Descriptive Statistics

Voter Disenfranchisement Laws

Probable versus Confirmed Lynchings

Alternative Operationalizations of Jim Crow

The "Era of Lynching"

Count Models

Rare Events Logit

State Fixed Effects

The Use of a Seasonal Dummy

Democratic Control of States after Reconstruction

To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592718003584

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S. | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2016, some of Donald Trump's armed supporters were observed "menacing" a Democratic Party campaign office; during the same election, a Republican campaign office was firebombed (Rosza Reference Rosza2016). Though rare today, electoral violence was once widespread in the United States, and remains so in a number of democracies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Back to lesson plans archive

Lesson Plan: Voter suppression then and now

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

For a Google doc of this lesson, click here.

Voter suppression tactics focus on making voting more difficult for specific groups of people. To what extent is voter suppression prevalent today and how does voter suppression today compare with voter suppression after Reconstruction?

Subject: Civics, Government, U.S. History

Grades: 9-12

Estimated time: 50-minutes, plus additional time to independently complete a one-pager.

Objectives: Students will:

Understand what voter suppression is.

Understand who is most affected by voter suppression.

Understand why voter suppression happened in the past and why it is happening now.

Procedure:

1. Students should have a general understanding of the Reconstruction period. This lesson is most appropriate after students have learned about Reconstruction.

2. Distribute " Student Handout #1-Voter Suppression, Then and Now Handout ." Engage students in a large-group discussion about the democratic participation of African Americans during the Reconstruction period. Ask them to consider the following questions:

1. What were the causes of increased participation in political and civic life during the Reconstruction period?

2. What effect might this increased participation have on many white Southerners?

3. How did many white Southerners respond to increased African American participation in politics?

3. Have students complete question #1: "Before you watch..."

4. Show RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR | Reconstruction | Part 2, Hour 1 | Episode 3 (minute 25:50 to 27:10).

5. Have students complete question set #2: "As you watch...." Engage students in a whole group discussion or have them discuss their answers in pairs.

6. Distribute "Student Handout #2 One-pager." Explain to students what a one-pager is, go over the directions, and show them some one-pager examples.

7. Have students complete question #3: "Before you listen..." Engage students in a whole group discussion or have them discuss their answers in pairs.

8. Go over questions #4, "As you listen...." and explain to students that they should take notes in the table as they listen to the podcast. This part of the lesson should be completed independently.

9. Have students listen to the podcast, Why voter suppression continues and how the pandemic has made it worse , taking notes as they listen. Give students the opportunity to listen on their own time so that they can go at their own pace. You might consider having students listen to the podcast as homework or to listen with headphones during class time.

10. Have students complete questions #5, "After you listen...." They should choose one of the two quotes from the podcast, that of Chris Hollins or Carol Anderson to develop a thesis statement. Their thesis statement should address the extent to which that quote represents continuity and/or change over time.

11. Students are now ready to complete their one-pagers. When they are done, they can manually submit their one-pagers. Or, students can take and upload a photograph of their one-pagers to Google Classroom or add them to a shared Google Slides presentation. The latter option is especially well suited for remote learning.

Extension: Have your students write a change over time essay that responds to the prompt: To what extent, and in what ways, has voter suppression changed since Reconstruction?
Kory Loyola teaches high school AP U.S. History and Debate and Public Speaking and coaches Debate in New Jersey. She is a graduate of Rutgers College and has a Masters Degree in Education from the Rutgers University School of Graduate Education and a Masters Degree in History and Culture from Drew University.

Follow us:

Subscribe:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lesson Plan: Voter suppression then and now | Lesson Plan | PBS NewsHour Extra

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Back to lesson plans archive Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. For a Google doc of this lesson, click here. Voter suppression tactics focus on making voting more difficult for specific groups of people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Why have certain groups had their voting rights restricted at various points in U.S. history?

More than 200,000 convicted felons in Virginia will now be able to vote once they have served their prison sentences.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order Friday to restore voting rights for felons, reversing what he called 115 years of disenfranchisement and allowing former prisoners to fully rejoin society.

Once you have served your time, once you have paid your debt to society ... why should you not be back in?" McAuliffe said.

While felony voting laws vary from state to state, only three states including Florida, Iowa and, until now, Virginia, permanently block felons from voting.

Republicans have accused McAuliffe of trying to make it easier for Hillary Clinton to win Virginia in November's presidential election, but the governor denies the changes were politically motivated.

Following the Civil War, Southern states like Virginia mandated poll taxes and literacy tests in attempts to make it harder for some citizens to vote. Today, one in thirteen African-Americans has lost their right to vote as a result of felony convictions in the U.S.

felon - a criminal who has committed a serious crime

disenfranchisement - to deprive a person of the right to vote

political opportunism - the attempt to maintain political support or increase political influence in a way which disregards relevant ethical or political principles

1. What guarantees a person's right to vote?

2. What are some reasons a person might not be allowed to vote in the U.S.?

3. Why is voting important to democracy?

1. Why do you think Gov. Terry McAuliffe decided to restore voting rights to convicted felons?

2. Do you think convicted felons should be allowed to vote upon their release from prison? Why or why not?

3. Do you think regaining the right to vote would make a difference for someone who has lost it? If so, how?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Voting rights restored for felons in Virginia | PBS NewsHour Extra

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why have certain groups had their voting rights restricted at various points in U.S. history? More than 200,000 convicted felons in Virginia will now be able to vote once they have served their prison sentences. Virginia Gov.

# data[].attributes.body
The event that inspired this resource, joint presentation with the Ashtabula NAACP and League of Women Voters Ashtabula County (Ohio).