“A march to the polls in Graham, North Carolina on October 31, 2020 ended in chaos after police deployed tear gas on a crowd that included children and the elderly. The painful images sparked comparisons to scenes of voter suppression in the 1960s.
“In some ways, not much has changed since that time. The simple act of casting a ballot is still fraught. Writing this off as merely a byproduct of the Trump administration is tempting, but the rot goes deep.
“Fragile Democracy: The Struggle Over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina – a new book by James L. Leloudis, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Robert Korstad, a professor emeritus at Duke University – takes a researched look at North Carolina’s fraught relationship with race and voting.”
(Sarah Edwards. “Fragile Democracy” Is a Galvanizing Look at North Carolina’s Long, Racist History of Voter Suppression.” Indy Week. Durham, N.C. November 04, 2020.)
Leloudis and Korstad, authors of Fragile Democracy, contend that America is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, “over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances.” Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation.
Fragile Democracy tells the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. It shows that struggles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. This history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.
(James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad. Fragile Democracy: The Struggle over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina. 2020.)
Fragile Democracy shows how the nation has become deeply politicized in a partisan manner. The authors argue that white supremacist rule for almost a century did more than any other force to impoverish North Carolina and its people. Democracy is still under siege as efforts at voter suppression continue – the struggle to guarantee every citizen free access to the vote and the power to influence public policy rages on.
The Brennan Center For Justice at the New York University School of Law found that the North Carolina restrictive voting law cut back on early voting and registration, and imposed harsh voter ID rules. A federal appeals court found it was crafted to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Weiser and Bannon reported that the North Carolina legislature passed gerrymanders so lopsided that multiple courts found them unconstitutional. When incumbent Republicans lost control of the governorship, legislators sought to entrench party power, passing a law that effectively put Republicans in charge of the state election board in perpetuity. The state’s GOP legislators even tried (unsuccessfully) to increase the size of the state supreme court to enable the outgoing governor to fill more seats.
(Wendy Weiser and Alicia Bannon. “Democracy.” Brennan Center for Justice. 2018.)
Voter restriction is not limited to North Carolina … not by a long shot. According to the Brennan Center for Justice (2019), since 2010, 25 states have enacted new voting restrictions, including strict photo ID requirements, early voting cutbacks, and registration restrictions.
The truth is the norms of constitutional democracy – the unwritten rules that curb power and prevent abuse – are regularly flouted. Many seemingly solid protections guiding our political actions and behaviors are flimsy. No laws prevented a president from hiding his taxes, from using the powers of government to bully news organizations or others that displease him, and from firing the prosecutors who investigated him. How about voting?
“Dark money now floods into all levels of our elections, including state judicial races. The Supreme Court gutted a century of campaign finance law and a half-century of voting rights protections, all by a slim five-to-four margin. A hostile foreign government manipulated the 2016 presidential campaign and tried to interfere with our voting systems.”
– Brennan Center for Justice
The ACLU reports …
“Voting rights are under attack nationwide as states pass voter suppression laws. These laws lead to significant burdens for eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. Since 2008, states across the country have passed measures to make it harder for Americans – particularly black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities – to exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot. These measures include cuts to early voting, voter ID laws, and purges of voter rolls.”
“One-third of voters who have a disability report difficulty voting and only 40 percent of polling places fully accommodate people with disabilities.”
– ACLU
Democracy demands that all eligible voters can participate and thus have their voices heard. Across the U.S., too many politicians are passing measures making it harder to cast a ballot. The goal is to manipulate political outcomes, and the result is a severely compromised democracy that doesn’t reflect the will of the people.
“We should ask ourselves, who is afraid of a truly diverse electorate and government, and why? Elections should be about the voters not big money interests. It’s time to limit SuperPACs and secret donors to protect representative democracy.”
– The League of Women Voters (2021)
Some of the most rampant methods of voter suppression across the country include the following:
Voter ID Laws
Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification. 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 is an obstacle for people with disabilities, the elderly, and people living in rural areas.
A recent analysis shows that strict identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in primaries and general elections. We also find that voter ID laws skew democracy toward those on the political right.
(Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi and Lindsay Nielson. “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes.” The Journal of Politics Volume 79, Number 2. April 2017.)
Voter Registration Restrictions
Restrictions can include requiring documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous penalties for voter registration drives or limiting the window of time in which voters can register.
The American Bar Association reports that some are seeking to exploit the voter registration process to make voting even more difficult for those least likely to engage by adding more requirements to voter registration or by recklessly removing potential voters from the voter rolls. These suppressive tactics are being challenged in court and are being dismantled in many cases. We must seek ways to make voter registration more accessible but also safe for those who are not yet eligible to vote.
(Terry Ao Minnis and Niyati Shah. “Voter Registration in Today's Democracy: Barriers and Opportunities.” American Bar Association. February 09, 2020.)
Voter Purges
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 purged when they show up at the polls on Election Day.
The American Bar Association reports that a minority of states go further and engage in a practice that ought to be seen as glaringly unconstitutional – purging people from the rolls solely because they have skipped voting in several consecutive elections and they have not responded to a letter asking them to confirm where they live.
(Paul M. Smith. "'Use It or Lose It': The Problem of Purges from the Registration Rolls of Voters Who Don't Vote Regularly. American Bar Association. February 10, 2020.)
A recent Brennan Center study (2028) found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016, and that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination – which are no longer subject to preclearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – had significantly higher purge rates.
Felony Disenfranchisement
A felony conviction can come with drastic consequences including the loss of your right to vote. But different states have different laws. Some ban voting only during incarceration. Some ban voting for life. Some ban people while on probation or parole; other ban people from voting only while incarcerated. And some states, like Maine and Vermont, 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.
“Across the country, one in 13 Black Americans cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.”
– ACLU
Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect Black people, who often face harsher sentences than white people for the same offenses. It should come as no surprise that 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.
As of 2020, an estimated 5.17 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, a figure that has declined by almost 15 percent since 2016, as states enacted new policies to curtail this practice. One out of 44 adults – 2.27 percent of the total U.S. voting eligible population – is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction.
(Chris Uggen, Ryan Larson, Sarah Shannon, and Arleth Pulido-Nava. “Locked Out 2020: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction.” The Sentencing Project. October 30, 2020.)
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 voice of millions of voters.
(“Block the Vote: Voter Suppression in 2020 American Civil Liberties Union. February 3, 2020.)
Of course, not all of the people were eligible to vote at the time of ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 2 effectively excluded women, as well as many free African Americans and Native Americans. It also excluded some white men, who were barred from voting by property ownership requirements that were the norm in 1787.
The Constitution has never fulfilled the democratic promise we associate with it. Put simply—and this is surprising to many people – there is no constitutional guarantee of the right to vote. Qualifications to vote in House and Senate elections are decided by each state, and the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that “[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”
Jonathan Soros, senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, says ...
“Enshrining the right to vote in the Constitution would help resolve most of these cases in favor of voters. It would not make every limitation unconstitutional—it is the essential nature of voting, for instance, that there be a date certain by which votes must be cast in order to be counted—but it would ensure that these limitations are judged under the standard known as 'strict scrutiny,' meaning that governments would have to show that the restrictions were carefully designed to address a compelling interest of the state.
“We would come to find that many familiar aspects of our current voting system would not meet this standard and access to the ballot could be extended to millions who are now actively or effectively disenfranchised.”
(Jonathan Soros. “The Missing Right: A Constitutional Right to Vote.” Democracy. Spring 2013)
“When stripped down to their essentials, all definitions of democracy rest ultimately on the primacy of electoral choice and the presumptive claim of the majority to rule. The removal of certain political views from the electoral arena limits the choices that are permitted to the citizenry and thus calls into question the legitimacy of the entire democratic enterprise.”
– Samuel Issacharoff, Harvard Law Review (April 01, 2007)
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