One Person, No Vote

The Black Belt is a string of counties along central Alabama where most Black citizens live. It includes the capital of Montgomery and the historic civil rights flashpoints of Birmingham and Selma. The region suffers from extreme poverty and is often the target of voter suppression efforts.

In 2008, a conservative nonprofit sued the FEC after it prevented the organization from airing a film criticizing Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the nonprofit’s claim that the FEC couldn’t regulate political advertising and overturned campaign financing laws that limited corporate spending on elections. Critics believed the decision enabled the infusion of untraceable “dark money” that can overwhelm political opponents (Duignan, Brian, “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Updated 14 January 2020).

Several post-Civil War amendments expand access to civil and voting rights. The Fourteenth Amendment grants equal protection under the law for all citizens; the Fifteenth Amendment expands the right to vote to all men over 21; the Nineteenth Amendment allows women to vote; the Twenty-Fourth Amendment abolishes poll taxes; and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment reduces the voting age to 18. While these amendments signify progress towards a more equal society, voter suppression laws find ways to circumvent these amendments.

Gerrymandering is the act of redrawing district maps to “insulate the legislative majority from the will of the voters” (107). Both parties are guilty of this act, but the advent of computer mapping technology exploits unprecedented data about voter preferences. Legislative majorities can create district maps that isolate their opponents into a handful of enclaves with little political power.

HAVA is a 2002 bill to alleviate American fears about voting integrity after the 2000 presidential election by providing funding for upgraded equipment and requiring identification to vote. While the HAVA recommends a diverse range of ID documents, Republican-controlled states often trim this list to a few options that disadvantage people of color, young voters, and the poor. States like Georgia refused federal funding to upgrade equipment as well.

Interstate Crosscheck is a database comparison system that is now operational in nearly 30 states. Officials use the system to justify purging alleged duplicate and fraudulent voters from voting rolls, but multiple investigations prove that it has an egregiously high error rate due to inconsistent record-keeping practices and false matches for common last names. Georgia has a similar system called Exact Match, and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity attempted to create an even more intrusive system nationwide.

Named after a Blackface routine, Jim Crow laws were regulations in the post-Civil War South that ensured White dominance over newly free Black citizens by segregating them into poorly funded neighborhoods, schools, and facilities. The Supreme Court initially upheld these laws as “separate but equal” but reversed its position in Brown v. Board of Education and other decisions to declare them unconstitutional. Anderson calls Georgia’s voter ID law “James Crow” as state governments use race-neutral language to achieve the same effect (78).

The NVRA standardizes registration processes, expands registration locations, and enables mail-in registration. Due to Republican pressure, the NVRA also includes provisions on removing names from registration databases due to death, failure to notify the government of a name change, moving out of state, personal request, and felony conviction in certain states. The state must also notify affected people by mail. In practice, voter roll purges often include infrequent voters and are negligent in informing voters.

This principle states that people should have equal representation in elections. Long a rallying cry for democratic movements, this concept solidified its position in the United States in the 1960s with the Supreme Court’s decision against gerrymandering in Baker v. Carr and the passing of the Voting Rights Act. The title One Person, No Vote subverts this principle by showing how laws since the Shelby decision strip citizens of their voting rights and threaten American democracy.

A primary is a preliminary election where voters choose which candidates will represent a political party in the general election. In states where one party is dominant, such as the Jim Crow Democrats, primaries are effectively the actual election. In the “White primary,” Southern states intentionally restrict primaries so that only White people could vote. Due to gerrymandering, extremist primary candidates have the best chance of beating incumbents.

Poll taxes forced citizens to pay before voting and were popular in the Jim Crow South because Black families often lived on credit and could not afford the accumulated fees. The 24th Amendment prohibits poll taxes for federal elections, but Anderson calls the various administrative tricks to limit access to IDs and polling places a new form of poll tax.

This is the Supreme Court case that invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed the federal government to determine which locales required preclearance for election laws. Anderson charges that this 5-4 decision ignores judicial precedent in favor of states’ rights arguments and naïve thinking about progress for people of color. As a result, Republican-controlled governments passed laws in the name of combating fraud that disfranchised people of color, the young, and the poor.

Swing states have a history of electing officials from both parties or changing demographics that favor one of the parties. These include Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. Gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression threaten these states by ensuring that one party maintains control regardless of popular will.