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One of America’s richest historical traditions, at least since the Reconstruction era, involves conservative whites continually finding new ways to rob minorities of their right to vote.
In her recent book One Person, No Vote, Carol Anderson, a historian at Emory University’s department of African-American studies, unpacks this history in extraordinary detail. She shows pretty definitively that the effort to suppress minority votes has never ceased, but has instead evolved into ever more sophisticated forms.
Today, we don’t see organized violence or literacy tests or poll taxes, but the art of preventing minorities from voting has improved dramatically. Now Republican state legislatures are using data and computer algorithms to purge inconvenient voters, gerrymander districts, institute racially motivated voter ID laws, and close key polling places in order to maximally suppress minority votes.
I spoke to Anderson about the history of voting rights in America, why the fight for suffrage never ends, and why she believes voter suppression is an existential threat to American democracy.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Black voter turnout fell by 7 percent in the 2016 presidential election. How do you account for that decline?
Carol Anderson
I attribute it to the fact that this was the first presidential election in 50 years without the protections of the Voting Rights Act. We saw in a number of states — including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, Florida, and others — that Republican state legislatures implemented voter suppression laws that very deliberately targeted minority groups, especially black voters. And it’s pretty clear that those suppression efforts were successful.
Sean Illing
You mentioned the Voting Rights Act protections — what were those, and why were they so significant?
Carol Anderson
The Voting Rights Act ensured that the federal government would no longer trust states with a demonstrated history of denying citizens the right to vote based on race. So it required states to meet certain guidelines before any changes to voting laws were implemented. Everything had to be cleared by the Department of Justice or by a federal court.
This was called “pre-clearance,” and it was a very powerful tool for protecting voting rights. I think by 2016 the DOJ had stopped something like 700 changes to voting laws precisely because they were racially discriminatory — that’s a lot. But in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance process from the Voting Rights Act, and that allowed states to implement racially discriminatory voting laws without any federal oversight.
Sean Illing
Let’s linger on that 2013 Supreme Court decision for a second. Do you think that decision effectively negated the 15th Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and states from denying citizens the right to vote based on race?
Carol Anderson
What it effectively did was take us back to the 1957 Civil Rights Act. It didn’t negate the 15th Amendment, because you still can’t explicitly discriminate. But the problem with the Civil Rights Act is that it didn’t have the pre-clearance mechanism, which short-circuits all the racially discriminatory laws before they can gain traction and do damage.
What you saw before the Voting Rights Act is that states would implement racially discriminatory voting laws and then use the courts to block any actions or slow down any attempt to undo their laws. That’s part of the reason we got the Voting Rights Act — it was apparent that the 1957 Civil Rights Act was absolutely impotent in the face of massive disfranchisement of black voters.
Sean Illing
A US district court recently ruled that partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina was done explicitly along racial lines. What other sorts of voter suppression tactics are we seeing across the country?
Carol Anderson
One of the most flagrant techniques is tinkering with voter ID laws. All of these tactics work really well because they sound reasonable. That’s how the original disenfranchisement tactics that came about in the Mississippi plan of 1890 were able to circumvent the 15th Amendment, because they sounded reasonable and not racially targeted.
The voter ID laws today are built on the massive lie of rampant voter fraud. You take this lie and you say it over and over again so that people believe it. Then you say, “Look, we’re only doing this because we want to protect democracy, and that’s why we want you to show your ID, so we know who you are.”
But what they’ve done is that it’s not any ID, only certain types of ID. Places like North Carolina and Texas figured out what kinds of IDs people had by race, and then used that information to determine which IDs were acceptable and which weren’t.
Look at what happened in Alabama. Alabama said, “You need a government-issued photo ID.” But then it said that a public housing ID would not count as a government-issued photo ID. Does it get more government-issued than public housing? But in a poor state like Alabama, where 71 percent of those in public housing are African-American and that’s the only ID they have, it was a brutally effective way to suppress the black vote.
Sean Illing
You mentioned Mississippi Plan of 1890, and it’s something you discuss a lot in the book. What was that? And are today’s voter suppression efforts just a 21st-century incarnation of the same policies?
Carol Anderson
The Mississippi plan of 1890 was a series of measures designed to keep black people from voting. They knew they couldn’t say, “We don’t want black people to vote,” because there was this 15th Amendment. So what they did was take conditions that were societally imposed on black people and then use that a litmus test for voting.
The obvious condition was poverty, which is why they developed the poll tax. If you’ve had hundreds of years of slavery, of unpaid labor, coming out of the civil war, then imposing a poll tax is a very effective means of denying black people the right to vote.
But again, it’s a racist measure that’s advanced under false pretenses. So instead of saying, “We don’t want black to vote,” they just said, “Well, democracy is expensive, and somebody has to collect all these ballots, so we need a tax to help pay for it.”
Sean Illing
So there is, substantively, no real difference between the tactics used in Mississippi in 1890 and the tactics being used today.
Carol Anderson
No, there isn’t. The voter ID laws really echo what we saw in 1890. For instance, if you’re poor and you’re in Alabama and you’re over 50, you probably weren’t born in a hospital, which means you don’t have a birth certificate. You didn’t need to have that to vote before, but now you do. This doesn’t make voting impossible, but it creates a needless barrier, and just as in 1890, that barrier is based on societally imposed conditions.
In 2016, there were 868 fewer polling places across the country, and most of those were shut down in minority and poor neighborhoods in the South. When you increase the distance from the population to a polling place, black voter turnout goes down by a certain percentage. We know this. Which is why in Sparta, Georgia, for example, a largely black community, they shut down a number of polling places and moved them 17 miles away.
Sean Illing
There’s something sort of diabolical about all of this. What we’re seeing, time and again, are clear violations of the spirit of the law but not exactly violations of the letter of the law.
Carol Anderson
Exactly. Texas, for instance, says you need a government-issued photo ID. Your student ID from the University of Texas does not count, but your gun registration card does. And why do that? Well, you do it to select the part of the electorate you think is more likely to vote for you and to suppress the part of the electorate that won’t.
Sean Illing
Can you say a bit about voter roll purges?
Carol Anderson
Sure — mind if I do a quick history lesson here?
Sean Illing
Please.
Carol Anderson
In the 1988 presidential election, the voter turnout rate was the lowest it had been since 1924. Congress was concerned, and eventually passed what was known as the “Motor Voter law” that would open up voter registration, so you didn’t always have to go down to the board of elections. If you went to the driver’s license bureau, you could register to vote there.
But to get this passed, the Republicans said that the law had to require voting roll maintenance. Again, that sounds very reasonable. If somebody has died, you don’t need them on the rolls. If somebody has moved out of the district, you don’t need them on the rolls. But what they’ve done is become very aggressive in terms of moving people off the rolls based on predictable voting patterns.
Sean Illing
What does that mean?
Carol Anderson
We know, for instance, that people who are young, poor, students, and minorities do not vote regularly. So if you use regular voting as your standard, then it allows you to cull the electorate and purge inconvenient voters off the rolls. To give you a sense of how powerful this is, note that between 2014 and 2016, close to 16 million Americans were purged from voting rolls across the country.
In Georgia, where I live, the current Republican governor, Brian Kemp, purged something like 340,000 voters from the state’s registration rolls while he was the acting secretary of state. He eliminated close to 11 percent of the registered voters from Georgia’s rolls.
Sean Illing
And what was his margin of victory in that gubernatorial race?
Carol Anderson
Just over 50,000 votes.
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Sean Illing
This kind of voter suppression seems much more insidious than it was in previous eras. The violence and the poll taxes and the literacy tests — all of that was visible and obvious and undeniable. But this form of voter suppression is quiet and bureaucratic and buried under the guise of “voting integrity” and “transparency.”
Carol Anderson
Yes, it is deeply insidious. In my last book, White Rage, I discussed how we normally think of Ku Klux Klan cross burnings and outright violence when we imagine what racial discrimination looks like. But the reality is that it’s often, as you put it, quiet and methodical and bureaucratic. This is what racism looks like in the 21st century, and it’s very hard to fight.
Sean Illing
Do you consider voter suppression an existential threat to American democracy?
Carol Anderson
I do. I wrote this book because we know that when people are rendered voiceless in their own country, you either get revolution or you get massive alienation, neither of which is healthy in a democracy. What we also know is that when you have politicians in power who are not responsive to the people, when you have, for instance, a president who is only responsive to his voters and not the country as a whole, that’s tremendously destructive to a democracy.
Sean Illing
What’s the solution? Is there a way out of this mess that feels, I don’t know, achievable?
Carol Anderson
In some ways, this feels like a mountain that’s too high to climb, too hard to climb. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It always comes down to mass mobilization. We just saw in the last midterm election a record-breaking turnout, and that sent a clear signal that Americans really want a viable democracy.
It’s going to be a hard battle, no doubt. It always is. But it’s a battle for democracy. It’s a battle for how we’re going to live and how our children are going to live the rest of their lives in this nation. So we have no choice but to fight it, and I believe we can win.
