Editor’s note: This commentary is by Tim Kipp, of Brattleboro, a self-described “crusty old activist since the 1960s” and a public school history teacher of 39 years, now retired.
[V]oting in the United States has again become a proprietary right, as equal access to the ballot box is not open to all. This is a history of exclusion, inclusion and suppression. Initially the Constitution excludes women, slaves, minorities, Native Americans and white men without property. Article I Sec. 4 remanded the electoral process to the states thus creating a complex, confusing and an unequal system vulnerable to local machinations and prejudices.
Throughout U.S. history people have struggled for the right to vote starting with the 15th Amendment in 1870 that temporarily gave blacks the franchise. This was followed by the 17th in 1913 that enabled the direct election of U.S. senators; the women’s vote was added in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment; in 1924, the Snyder Act gave Native Americans the vote; in 1962, the poll tax was outlawed with the 24th Amendment. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act redressed the failures of the 15th Amendment to staunch the rise of Jim Crow repression, and in 1971 18-year-olds became voters with the adoption of the 27th Amendment.
The Constitution ensured that the people would not have the power to choose their president. According to Founding Father Edmund Randolph these decisions were too important to be left to “the turbulence and follies of democracy.” The Electoral College ensured that, in the words of founder John Jay, “ the people who own the country ought to run it.” In five presidential elections from 1824 to 2016, the Electoral College selectors overrode the popular vote to appoint a minority president.
In classic dialectical fashion progressive victories spawned a conservative backlash of structural suppression. By the 1870s the freedmen were gaining political and economic power but this would not hold with the rise of the homegrown terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and its many clones during the course of Reconstruction. This first Jim Crow era of racist vigilante terrorists, businessmen, politicians, and law enforcement coalesced into a successful drive to secure a system of neo-slavery to protect the “southern way of life.”
As Mark Twain told us, history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself but it certainly does rhyme. With the victories of the modern civil rights movement came the backlash of white supremacy in the 1970s, now dressed not in white robes and hoods but in the suits and ties of the legal system and the starched collars of the religious right. First Nixon and then Reagan opposed the extension of the ’65 Voting Rights Act. Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and Reagan’s “government is the problem” mantra always held lurking subtexts to disempower minorities. Twentieth century racism employed more subtle language and imagery.
By the 1980s a powerful conservative movement emerged in reaction to the purported “excesses of democracy” of the 1960s and an energized right wing under a popular President Reagan and a politicized religious right’s revulsion over the counterculture and the expansion of abortion rights. By the 1980s the Democratic Party was well on its way of abandoning Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Clinton’s presidency marked the apotheosis of Democratic acquiescence to the rise of corporate power and encouraged the opening of the floodgates of reactionary politics that included surgical voter suppression.
Before Reagan’s ascendency Republicans developed a long game strategy to institutionalize conservative political muscle by more aggressively mobilizing corporate power in the service of politics. In 1971 conservative activist, corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell warned that the American economic system was under attack and called for the massive corporate funding of efforts to shape a new political economy of deregulation, tax cut for the wealthy, neutered labor unions, a conservative Supreme Court and a re-energized role for business in the political sector.
The Powell Memo became a corporate call-to-arms. The Republican elites read the memo, studied it and went to work. They were smart and motivated. This led to unprecedented financial support for new conservative and libertarian think tanks such as the Federalist Society and the Manhattan and Cato Institutes, academic programs, and comprehensive legislative initiatives such as the highly effective American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC] which has been writing and promoting laws for Republicans on the state level since 1973.
Long before Trump’s malignant assaults on the fibers of democracy, a resurgent conservative movement effectively narrowed the middle ground of debate and compromise. Now the ends would justify any means regardless of the impact on the democratic process. The day Obama was elected, Republican leaders would infamously announce their primary goal would be to make Obama a one-term president, so the resistance began. Politicize the Supreme Court, undermine confidence in the electoral process, gerrymander districts and suppress the vote.
Unlike the old Jim Crow this iteration cast a wider net caging not just minorities but low income, youth, anybody who could potentially commit the sin of voting progressive or Democrat.
Unique among the world’s democracies the U.S. has a politicized and decentralized-state voting system. Politics rules how most states administer their elections. Partisan control means the majority party can decide how, where and when people register and vote. In 2000, 14 states had secretaries of state infusing politics into the voting systems, by 2016 the total was 36 states.
There are over 10,000 polling places across the country and, according to election experts and even Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the electronic voting system is highly vulnerable to international and domestic cyberattack. Yet there are still 12 states that do not have paper ballot backup. Moreover many of the machines across the country are protected by copyrights that can prevent integrity audits. A major voting machine maker, Electronic Systems and Software, has invoked such legalities. Thus private profit trumps the public’s right to a fair election.
Partisan control has also enabled gerrymandering, the art of drawing voting districts to advantage one party over another. If we had a viable multi-party system of proportional representation, the problem of gerrymandered districts would disappear as European democracies figured out long ago.
In 1788, prior to our initial national election, Patrick Henry of Virginia mapped the first designer district to prevent James Madison from winning a seat in the U.S. House. (The term “gerrymander” first appeared in a Boston newspaper in 1812 in reference to governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry, an enthusiast for voter manipulation.)
Today, more than 30 states are severely gerrymandered. In 2016 these inequities gave 22 more seats to Republicans in the U.S. House. In 1962 the Supreme Court affirmed the principle of “one person-one vote” in Baker v. Carr, 50 years later that democratic principle is on life support with Republicans running the ER. In fairness, historically both parties have gerrymandered but clearly the Republicans have taken it to its current extreme.
The Supreme Court effectively set the stage for a comprehensive assault on the electoral process with its campaign finance decisions. Buckley v. Valeo, 1976, Citizen’s United in 2010, McCutcheon v. FEC, 2013, opened the floodgates to corporate financing of elections. The Roberts court was not done yet; in 2013 the Shelby v. Holder decision eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court threw out Section 5 the “pre-clearance” protection against voting discrimination and as Chief Justice Roberts opined, “Voter discrimination is largely a thing of the past.”
After the Shelby decision, 32 Republican-controlled states immediately passed legislation to suppress the vote. The cover for this blatant abuse of the democratic process was the chimera of voter fraud. In 2017, 99 bills were offered in Republican-controlled states to make it harder to cast a ballot.
Two creative and effective Republican suppression methods are requiring rigorous voter identification standards and instituting the comprehensive purging of voter rolls. Thirty-two states require state-approved IDs in order to vote. The poster boy of voter IDs is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a 2018 candidate for governor. Who gets to vote can actually be curated by designing rules that disproportionally discriminate against certain demographics. For instance, a state can accept a hunting license or a National Rifle Association membership card as a proper ID but refuse a college ID. Certain states like New Hampshire refuse to accept a post office box as a valid address; such restrictions harm low income and Native Americans voters.
Strict ID laws disproportionately harm Democratic and progressive voters. Trends in recent elections indicate that stricter ID laws resulted in a 7.7 percent drop in Democratic turnout compared to 4.6 percent for Republicans. In strong liberal areas the drop was 10.7 percent and for strong conservative areas the decline was 2.8 percent. Kobach has also proposed a “proof of citizenship” standard in Kansas in contrast to all other states that only require a sworn oath of citizenship under penalty of law for misrepresentation.
Purging voters from the rolls as a putative defense against voter fraud is another favorite Republican tactic. Georgia’s secretary of state and candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, has led the most aggressive charge. From 2012 to 2016 he purged 1.5 million Georgia voters. In 2018 he purged 53,000 voters, 70 percent who are African-American, employing the “Cross Check” system that is currently being used in 30 states. By 2014, 7.2 million voters were targeted nationwide.
The claim of voter fraud is itself a fraud. Kobach co-chaired Trump’s voter “fraud commission” that disbanded in less than a year for lack of evidence. New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice’s study concluded that Trump’s charges were baseless, with only few examples of irregularities attributable to unintentional mistakes. It’s indeed ironic on its face that Republicans are so unhinged about people voting multiple times when we can hardly get more than 50 percent to actually vote once.
Other suppression tactics include limiting early, weekend or night voting. Also reducing the actual number of voting locations especially in student or minorities areas are popular methods. Twenty percent of the polling places in Georgia and Texas have been closed in minority neighborhoods. In addition, if you are one of the 5.8 million ex-felons or one of the 4 million residents of D.C. or Puerto Rico, you can’t vote for president.
Again, if you are a person of color, low income, a college student or anyone with a propensity to vote Democratic, you are a target of conservatives. As historian and political analyst Jack Beattie observed, the Republican Party is willing to give up democracy in order to retain political power.
Ultimately the most effective method of voter suppression is not these pernicious, cynical attempts to undermine democracy. A more effective and comprehensive method is to create a political economy where large sectors of the country feel hopeless and mistrustful of the system.
The U.S. has one of the lowest voter turnout rates ranking 26 out of 32 world’s leading democracies. Most European countries have much higher rates of participation. Turnout trends in recent U.S. presidential elections range from 54 to 62 percent and 35 to 40 percent for midterms.
Why such dismal results? Conventional analysis tells us that people are lazy and don’t really care. Well, is it apathy or could it be alienation? If people don’t see the system addressing their real interests, such as health care, housing, employment, food security and education, then citizens, in a misguided but logical response, will withdraw into pessimism and inaction. Since 1966 the Harris Poll has been tracking Americans’ attitudes about the political system.
According to recent data in this “Alienation Index” survey 82 percent of Americans feel that leaders don’t really care about the needs of all its citizens and 78 percent feel the rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer. A Gallup Poll in 2016 reported that 70 percent of Americans believe the electoral system “lacks integrity.”
In their monumental study of citizen influence on the political economy, “Testing Theories of American Politics” political scientists, Martin Gilens and Ben Page concluded that “… majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts” … “policy-making is dominated by powerful business organizations, and a small number of affluent Americans.” With over 50 percent of the U.S. House and 66 percent of the Senate being millionaires/billionaires is it any wonder that people’s real needs are not being met?
When the political and economic system willfully disempowers its citizens the consequences are self-evident. Today we are experiencing dual revolts, one on the right and the other on the left, one born of desperation and pessimism, the other of constructive anger and guarded optimism. One path leads to authoritarianism, the other to democracy. As citizens we can seize the power to alter our course and walk the path of democracy but only if we choose to act.
