One Person, No Vote

Comment by Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص on September 23, 2024 at 9:27am

As the elaborate post-mortem of the presidential election drags on — amid all the diagnoses of Russian interference, Clintonian blunders and white-working-class resentment — Carol Anderson wants to direct your attention to one simple fact: In November 2016, black voter turnout fell by 7 percent.

Anderson rebukes anyone who takes this as a facile statement of how black voters felt about Hillary Clinton. “Minority voters did not just refuse to show up,” she writes in “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.” “Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African-Americas, Hispanics and Asian-Americans from the polls.”

The 2016 presidential election was the first in 50 years to be held without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. Three years before, in 2013, the Supreme Court had revoked the part of the law that required states with a history of voting discrimination to get federal approval in order to change their voting statutes. The ruling effectively left voters at the mercy of state legislators. Some of these law makers, like the Republican Party itself, didn’t draw significant support from minority communities. So in the interests of self-preservation, Anderson says, they changed the laws in ways that made it harder for minorities to vote. President Donald J. Trump is just one result; a profound and polarizing distortion of American democracy is another.

Anderson’s argument isn’t new. Ari Berman, the author of the excellent “Give Us the Ballot” (2015), has been making a similar case to anyone who will listen. His book also included original reporting, and interviews with lawyers, activists and government officials who experienced the implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act firsthand.

Comment by Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص on September 23, 2024 at 10:01am

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