One Person, No Vote

Anderson avoids centering the battle for voting rights on a handful of people. This struggle is happening across many states with unsung activists, lawyers, and organizations advancing this cause.

The NAACP plays a key role in addressing African American needs nationwide. This is important in terms of both financing countrywide endeavors and building local leadership in states, cities, and universities. For example, the organization entrusted the Alabama chapter with guiding resources during the 2017 special election towards grassroots activism and restoration clinics rather than on advertising.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (NAACP LDF) has a history of overturning racist laws and preserving civil rights legislation, such as its support of students in Prairie View A&M against local officials who want to restrict access to early voting. It is often joined in legal efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which defends against invasive overreach regardless of administration. These legal battles are long and require persistence and vigilance after a victory to avoid setbacks. When Prairie View A&M loses its effort to expand access to early voting, Anderson notes: “The LDF’s response was vintage LDF. This isn’t over” (171).

Anderson’s overview of the 2017 Alabama special election demonstrates the importance of specialized groups. Woke Vote focuses its efforts on millennial citizens in HBCUs, while Righteous Vote mobilizes churches, as 83% of Black people believe in God. Funding from BlackPAC and other outside groups—necessary to counter the influx of Republican-favoring political advertising after the Citizens United decision—allows for additional canvassers and phone workers who change the perception of voting from a chore to a responsibility. Finally, organized groups and everyday citizens participate in rideshare efforts to bring people without cars to the polls.

These efforts are not without risks, however, as state officials target activists whose voter registration drives threaten their power. Pickens County Voters League President Julia Wilder and local NAACP Chapter President Maggie Bozeman both suffer imprisonment for alleged absentee ballot tampering in 1979, and the League of Women Voters no longer operate in Texas due to onerous regulations that make it nearly impossible to register voters. In contrast, a Republican governor’s desire to pin his defeat on a local Black organization is the only reason why Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr.’s forged absentee ballot campaign is discovered.

Democrat-leaning states and some swing states are implementing Automatic Voter Registration, and citizens of states with heavy voter suppression can still force some changes through independent ballot measures. However, Georgia’s AVR system and Florida’s efforts to circumvent the felon enfranchisement amendment demonstrate the power of entrenched officials. Overcoming undemocratic forces in the long haul will require sustained effort.

John Roberts became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 2005 under President George W. Bush. Prior to the appointment, he served as a clerk for Justice William Rehnquist and as part of the DOJ’s Civil Rights division under Ronald Reagan.

News outlets frame John Roberts as a moderate conservative and swing vote, but Anderson depicts him as an active agent against the Voting Rights Act. She notes how Rehnquist’s ideas, such as comparing the VRA to reparations, influences Roberts’s judicial philosophy, and she quotes a POLITICO profile about how Roberts is “not a believer in the courts giving rights to minorities” and has “fundamental suspicions” about the act (39). She makes a point about the difference between the VRA giving people rights and acknowledging that they should have them.

When discussing Supreme Court cases, Anderson points out how Republican voter fraud rhetoric influences even the country’s highest judge. In a ruling prior to Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts criticizes the Voting Rights Act for removing preclearance requirements from too few districts instead of recognizing that many still try to suppress voters. The Shelby decision ignores judicial precedent and opens the floodgates to voter suppression measures throughout the country. In Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections and Gill v. Whitford, Roberts dismisses measurable means of proving the disproportional impact of voter ID laws and evaluating district maps for gerrymandering. He blames civil rights groups for not providing reliable evidence even though the voter fraud campaign does not share the same burden of proof.

Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments to discourage partisanship, but they have clear ideological leanings that influence American law for decades. The VRA and other civil rights legislation remained in place because the Earl Warren Supreme Court defended them against multiple challenges, whereas it only took one decision by the Roberts’s Court to dismantle it. The court, however, is not immune to the effects of voter suppression as justices receive nominations from elected officials. Gerrymandering encourages hyper-partisanship in Congress, which has led to the removal of the 60-vote requirement for judicial nominees in 2017 and the appointment of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Bret Kavanaugh after controversial vetting processes. Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh also reached their positions at a relatively young age. Without checks to voter suppression, the Supreme Court will become more partisan and resistant to civil rights reform.

Both Brian Kemp of Georgia and Kris Kobach of Kansas are politicians who exploit voter fraud rhetoric to entrench their party’s political control and advance their own ambitions. Both leverage the Secretary of State office’s control over election operations and license-issuing institutions to make it difficult for undesired populations to vote, with Kobach mentioning this aspect as part of his interest in the job.

Anderson calls Kemp a “voter suppression warrior” who makes use of every option to influence Georgia elections (78). This includes using the overly simplistic Exact Match system to purge voter rolls, limiting acceptable IDs, targeting activist groups, reducing polling and early voting in cities, and delaying equipment upgrades. This is despite Georgia’s relatively progressive AVR processes.

As Kemp prepared for his own gubernatorial run in 2018, he adopted Trump rhetoric by claiming that his challenger was encouraging undocumented migrants to vote and that he would create “a big, red, beautiful wall” to stunt Democrat progress (173). Kemp continued to endorse Trump’s agenda, including preventing cities from instituting mandatory mask orders early in the COVID-19 pandemic. He only reversed these efforts after Georgia suffered one of the nation’s worst outbreaks that disproportionately affected people of color. This situation demonstrated how voter suppression can have life-and-death consequences (Bluestein, Greg. “Kemp’s Latest Order Allows Local Mask Mandates for the First Time.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 15 August 2020).

Signs of election illegitimacy in Georgia continued to increase. The state deleted election records when confronted about hacking and ignored irregularities from compromised machines in the 2018 election. Meanwhile, a 2020 ACLU report showed that 198,351 out of 313,243 names on an October 2019 voter purge list that were removed for moving did not actually move at all—a 66.3% error rate (Palast, Greg et. al., “Georgia Voter Roll Purge Errors.” ACLU Georgia, 1 September 2020). A few days later, Kemp’s office claimed that more than 1,000 people voted twice during the 2020 primary and that the state will seek full legal punishments. One Person, No Vote shows how these investigations never unearth any widespread conspiracies, so this is more a sign of how Kemp continues to use voter fraud as a distraction (“1,000 People Double Voted in Georgia Primary, Secretary of State Says.” Fox 5 Atlanta, 2020).

A Harvard graduate and Yale law alum, Kobach had a history of supporting anti-immigration programs and “associated minority voters with ‘ethnic cleansing’” (84). This includes guiding a DOJ screening program that deported thousands of Muslims but found no terrorists, as well as supporting Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s prejudicial enforcement practices in Arizona. Kobach regularly used any fraud case to warn about fraud, such as claiming that someone voted under a dead man’s name, Albert Bowser, who turned out to be his son, Albert Bowser, Jr.

Despite only being a state official, Kobach exerted national influence over voting rights through his advocacy of Interstate Crosscheck and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Like Kemp, Kobach attempted his own gubernatorial run during the 2018 midterms but lost, and he also lost the 2020 GOP primary for a US Senate seat after receiving no major political endorsements (Moore, Elena. “Conservative Kris Kobach Loses Kansas GOP Senate Primary.” NPR, 4 August 2020). Kobach was also a legal counsel and board member of a private border wall fundraising project now under federal investigation (Kaczynski, Andrew & Nathan McDermott. “Kris Kobach Claimed He Spoke with ‘Enthusiastic’ Trump Three Times about Border Wall Project at Center of Fraud Investigation.” CNN, 21 August 2020).