The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrated exactly how little the United States has progressed since the civil rights era. The right, still battling against the foundation and promise of a multiracial democracy, has demonstrated its willingness to use violent means to preserve political control. Meanwhile, Republican leaders are launching a less obvious and more mechanical attack on the idea of a fairly elected government.
Simply put, many Republicans are not leaving the next election to chance—or, heaven forbid, the will of the voters.
Patricia Sullivan, a historian at the University of South Carolina and author of the stirring and important new book Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White, told me in an interview that, due to partisan redistricting and a slew of voter suppression laws, we are living through a period of widespread Black disenfranchisement. The U.S. Supreme Court decision to undermine the federal oversight provisions of the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 case, Shelby County v. Holder, created an opening for rightwing, anti-democratic forces to, she says, “limit access to the ballot” and “dilute the impact of Democratic-leaning voters, with a focus on Black voters.”
This is especially true in the Carolinas, Sullivan contends: “In addition to requiring a government-issued ID, South Carolina has several provisions in place to limit voting access. Residents must register thirty days before an election (the longest period allowed by federal law); access to absentee ballots is restricted (after a yearlong exception due to the pandemic) and require a witness signature; and residents convicted of a felony lose their voting rights while serving time in prison, or on probation or parole.”
Black Americans, she says, account for 64 percent of citizens disenfranchised by this last requirement.
Many local activists and organizations are fighting against the disenfranchisement of Black voters, college students, disabled Americans, and other Democratic constituencies. One group committed to the preservation of the integrity of electoral politics is Democracy North Carolina. When I spoke with the organization’s communications manager, Joselle Torres, she warned that an “array of extreme anti-voter attacks” threaten to “roll back decades of voter freedoms.”
Republican legislators in North Carolina acted aggressively to limit the vote.
First, they passed Senate Bill 326, a measure to, in the words of Torres, “remove a safeguard that protects absentee voters from mail delays.” Current law allows for the tallying of absentee ballots received up to three days after the election, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day. Republicans in North Carolina are seeking to revoke that protection, which would inevitably create the potential for thousands of nullified votes.
They also passed Senate Bill 725, blocking county election boards from accepting grant money from nonprofit organizations to assist with everything from compensating poll workers to mailing registration information to county residents.
Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed both bills, but a future Republican governor would likely sign them without hesitation.
Torres says an additional proposed law, House Bill 259, would “essentially mandate a voter purge program by targeting voters suspected of being non-citizens based on unreliable jury excusal lists.” It would also publicize those lists, “potentially exposing North Carolina’s immigrant community to harassment and violence from rightwing vigilantes.”
Democracy North Carolina expects House Bill 259 to pass through the state legislature, and reach the governor’s desk in February or March.
Republicans have already employed similar constraints on voting in several other states. In 2002, Florida state and county governments settled a lawsuit with the NAACP over the 2000 election, acknowledging that they wrongfully eliminated thousands of Black voters from the polls. Amid much controversy and after U.S. Supreme Court intervention, George W. Bush won the state of Florida—and the presidency—by only 537 votes.
In 2016, North Carolina state Republican officials were shameless enough to boast of lowering Black turnout in the presidential election by 8.5 percent. Before the same election, North Carolina also closed twenty-seven polling places—most of them in Black and Latinx neighborhoods and on college campuses. Hillary Clinton lost the state by fewer than 200,000 votes.
As if the brutal tactics of voter suppression were not sufficiently autocratic, North Carolina—along with states such as Georgia and Texas—is also redistricting its electoral maps to weaken the power of the Black electorate. North Carolina’s 2020 house district map already favored Republicans, giving them eight out of thirteen seats with only 49.9 percent of statewide votes.
The redrawn 2022 map, by practicing what voting rights advocates refer to as “stacking, cracking, and packing,” is likely to reduce Democratic seats to four, while the Democrats’ share of statewide votes has continued to grow.
In Wisconsin, where Kyle Rittenhouse was recently acquitted after killing two Black Lives Matter protesters, Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 by 23,000 votes. A University of Wisconsin study found that in the same year, voter ID requirements and other suppression tactics kept between 12,000 and 23,000 voters, mostly Black, out of the voting booth in the cities of Madison and Milwaukee.
On November 30, 2021, the Wisconsin Supreme Court virtually guaranteed that highly partisan political maps will favor Republicans for the next ten years. The ACLU of Wisconsin warns that state Republican efforts to limit access to absentee ballots, and erect more barriers in the way of voter registration, amount to a “brazen and deliberate attempt . . . to suppress people’s voting rights.”
Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s organization, the National Redistricting Action Fund, has filed a lawsuit in Ohio, claiming that its redrawn electoral map gives Republicans an unfair advantage, calling it a “partisan gerrymander in violation of the state constitution.” The Ohio State Supreme Court ruled the gerrymandered map illegal in January, but fights over partisan redistricting remain in Texas, Michigan, North Carolina, and several other states.
Simply put, many Republicans are not leaving the next election to chance—or, heaven forbid, the will of the voters. Ginned up by Steve Bannon and other fascist strategists, “Stop the Steal” activists are seeking and often obtaining positions on county election boards and state election offices. Aunna Dennis, executive director of the Georgia chapter of the voting advocacy group Common Cause, told the Associated Press that the partisan takeover of election boards in her state amounts to nothing less than “an upheaval of our election system.”
The National Redistricting Action Fund, the ACLU of Wisconsin, and Democracy North Carolina are fighting for the survival of the democratic system. But Patricia Sullivan, drawing insight from her brilliant study of Robert F. Kennedy, cautions that even the most valiant state and local efforts are destined to fail without robust federal intervention.
“One lesson for the Biden Administration is to marshal all of its forces to fight for legislation to restore and expand the protection of voting rights, and expand and strengthen the efforts of the Justice Department to monitor and challenge voting rights violations,” Sullivan said during our conversation.
Attorney General Merrick Garland showed signs of promise in December by filing a federal lawsuit alleging that Texas’s newly drawn Congressional district maps violate the Voting Rights Act. Many civil rights organizations had already condemned the Texan maps as gerrymandered attempts to undermine Black, Latinx, and progressive white voters, while also ensuring a permanent Republican majority. The problem, legal experts warn, is that the case will move slowly, and if it lands in the Supreme Court’s docket, the right wing will likely rule in Texas’s favor.
To save democracy, Democrats need to abolish the filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Biden have called for filibuster reform, if not outright elimination of the filibuster, for legislation involving voting rights.
With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, Democrats would then, in all likelihood, pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For the People Act, which together would not only restore the full strength of the Voting Rights Act, but expand upon the protections that it guarantees to all citizens.
In November, I asked the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., one of the country’s foremost civil rights leaders, to comment on what is happening in South Carolina, the state where he was born and raised.
“The Electoral College, the filibuster, and the gerrymander—all ‘laws’ that have historic racism at their core—are structural minority rules that allow a minority to exercise disproportionate power, and overrule the will of the majority,” Jackson told me. “America is in danger of losing its democracy by allowing minority rules to lead to minority rule.”