58 pages • 1 hour read
Carol AndersonOne Person, No Vote
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Voter Roll Purge”
On the surface, voter roll purges mitigate fraud by removing from registration banks deceased people, changed names, and those who leave the state. In practice, these lists often take infrequent voters along with them, mostly the young and people of color. Since 2001, Virginia purged 46,637 voters from its list, Florida 182,000, Indiana 481,235, Georgia 591,549, and Ohio 2 million.
Voter registration became a national issue after record-low turnout in the 1988 election. In response, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 to standardize processes, expand registration locations, and create mail-in options. Registration increased by 3.3 million voters over several years, but the NVRA’s guidelines on voter roll maintenance, however, enabled foul play.
In Ohio, 1.2 million out of the 2 million voters removed were only infrequent voters, as a 1994 state supplement allowed officials to remove those who don’t vote after six years. This particularly harms African Americans and city residents: Obama carried Cleveland by 69% of the vote in 2012, but the amount of Democrat voters dropped to 66% in 2016 while Republican levels remained the same.
Under Secretary of State Brian Kemp, Georgia maintained a growing population but falling voter numbers. Ineptitude defined Kemp’s elections office as it lost records for about 40,000 residents and leaked Social Security and driver’s license data twice. The office targeted Black and Asian outreach groups, finding just 25 bad cases out of 85,000 investigated, and purged 1 million inactive voters using Exact Match, an oversight system that compares voter registration and DMV data. This program flagged names just for spelling inconsistencies like missing accent marks. African Americans accounted for 64% of completed and pending cancelations between 2013 and 2016, while Asian and Latino names were six times more likely to face delays than White names. Washington Post and state university investigations found no evidence of Kemp’s fraud claims.
In 2016, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office rejected more ballots than the much-larger Florida. Kobach’s Secure and Fair Elections Act (SAFE) required photo IDs to cast a ballot, driver’s license and signature verification for absentee voting, and proof of citizenship for registration. SAFE suspended voting rights for 35,314 Kansas residents, and while Kobach claimed that it would prevent 18,000 illegal votes, the only violator he found was a Peruvian immigrant undergoing naturalization. The US Commission on Civil Rights found SAFE discriminatory and unnecessary.
Kobach promoted the Interstate Crosscheck data-matching program with participation by nearly 30 states. It held 45 million records, including dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, with 7.2 million flagged names. Kobach championed a case where Interstate Crosscheck caught a 66-year-old Republican, Lincoln L. Wilson, voting in two states as proof of its need. States like Virginia and Texas used the system to remove “inactive” or “weak” matches in the hundreds of thousands, but the databases had many inconsistencies, such as missing middle names and no differentiation between common last names. A four-university study found the system to have a 99% error rate, yet Crosscheck is responsible for purging 14% of Black voters because of “double-voting” or “fraud.” Journalist Charles P. Pierce called Ohio’s use of the system a sign that Republicans cannot win legitimately.
Kobach gained the favor of President Trump, who blamed illegal voters for his popular vote loss, and became part of Vice President Mike Pence’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The Pence Commission demanded voter data from all 50 secretaries of state, but only six states complied. Meanwhile, the DOJ under Attorney General Jeff Sessions prioritized voter fraud investigations.
Some states practice felony disfranchisement, which temporarily or permanently strips convicted felons of voting rights and impacts 6.1 million Americans. Because of over-policing from the War on Drugs, 1 in 13 Black people cannot vote due to a felony conviction. Florida’s Jim Crow era constitution made it one of four states that permanently disfranchised felons, affecting 21% of the African American voting-age population. Those who wanted to restore their voting rights must meet with a quarterly governor’s committee, with Governor Rick Scott rarely giving approval.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Anderson calls the victims of voter roll purges “electronically dead” in the eyes of the government (72). Just like the Help America Vote Act, the NVRA included language that bad actors could abuse. Republicans stalled the passage of the act for three years to get these provisions and then ignored the narrow maintenance guidelines so that they could remove infrequent voters. Anderson calls these practices illegal. The NVRA also includes a provision requiring the state to inform citizens about the change via mail. Renters, young people, and city residents are more likely to miss or dismiss these jargon-filled letters. Republicans dodge criticism by suggesting that infrequent voters are lazy, but Anderson counters that not voting is also a right. She also compares this requirement to the Catch-22 of literacy tests as poll closings and invalidated absentee ballots for minor errors make it harder to vote.
Anderson calls the practices in Georgia “James Crow”—a retread of old discriminatory practices (78). Like the Mississippi Plan, state operations under Kemp frequently disadvantage people of color, who are more transient and less likely to vote. Brian Kemp claims that his office only purges people who do not contact an elections official in seven years, but Anderson counters with a simple question: Why would a voter contact an official without a reason? The seven-year period is also one year short of a two-term presidency, ensuring that those who voted for Obama in 2008 but skipped the 2012 election would fall off the roll.
The Lincoln L. Wilson case is an example of a Republican running afoul of voter suppression methods and of Interstate Crosscheck catching a legitimate case. Wilson owned residences in Kanas and Colorado, and he believed that he could vote on local issues in both states. Wilson pled guilty to three misdemeanor charges as a result. While the local prosecutor wanted to be lenient, Kobach made an example of him, resulting in $56,158 in legal fees, fines, and court costs.
Trump’s electoral vote defeat was a sore spot for the president and encouraged his spread of conspiracy theories. One is that he lost in New Hampshire because Hillary Clinton bussed Massachusetts voters over state lines. Anderson points to a simpler explanation: Many Massachusetts college students attend New Hampshire schools, so they voted in that state. Aside from a few token Democrats, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and its summoned experts were voting rights crusaders, including one who claimed that African Americans were violating White Americans’ right to vote and another who wanted voters to undergo background checks. That measure would target the skepticism and fear that many people of color have with law enforcement.
Felony disfranchisement became a way for officials to strip people of color of voting rights under the guise of punishing criminals. The War on Drugs began in the 1970s to stem illegal drug use and reduce crime, but enforcement disproportionately targeted Black people: 12.5% of illicit drug users are African American, but they represent 29% of arrests and 33% of convictions. Dog-whistle campaigns like the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which blamed the Democratic candidate for an inmate who beat and raped a woman while on a furlough program, pushed the perception that felons were irredeemable. It also discouraged politicians from punishment reform programs until overcrowded prisons became a bipartisan issue. Vermont and Maine, two states where African Americans comprise only 1% of the population, are the only ones with no felony disfranchisement guidelines.
Anderson considers Florida to be the worst state in this area. Not only is permanent disfranchisement a means of controlling African American voices, but the high inmate population artificially inflates Florida’s population and national influence just like the Constitution’s former Three-Fifths Compromise. To understand the extent Governor Rick Scott refuses to return voting rights to felons, Anderson compares the 2,300 approvals he granted in comparison to the 155,300 of his now ex-Republican predecessor. In the Afterword, Anderson returns to ongoing efforts to repeal these restrictions.
