Does Every Vote Actually Count?
Voter suppression in the Trump era.
The history of voter suppression and it’s mechanisms to suppress minority votes is a part of the bigger puzzle to voting rights in the United States. After the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, many free slaves earned the right to hold office and vote; however, many laws were put in place to restrict them from doing so.
Jim Crow laws inhibited African-Americans the very right to vote by means of instituting poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests and more.
Today, we see this as an extreme problem in the era of the Trump Administration. Voter suppression mechanisms have rendered their way back into the forefront of society — or better yet, have transformed into equivalents for the modern day.
In North Dakota, the Supreme Court has recently allowed for new voter identification requirements that will take effect during this years midterm election cycle. This change has sent many Native Americans scrambling for a solution.
Under this new law, North Dakotans cannot vote unless they have identification that includes their name, birth date, and residential address. The problem here is that Native American Reservations do not have housing addresses; they have P.O boxes. This is no longer an option if you want to vote.
Senator Heidi Heitkamp faces a tough re-election race in North Dakota. Currently, she is behind in the polls, and with a low voter turnout of Native Americans, it will be nearly difficult for her to catch up and win the race.
Native Americans in North Dakota make up about 5 percent of the overall 750,000 residents in the area according to the U.S. Census Bureau. They not only fall under the constraints of the new Supreme Court law, but they have also historically voted at very low rates and yield many barriers that restrict them from effectively getting to voting polls. These range from high poverty rates to the long distances to the polls and low graduation rates in high school.
In the state of Georgia, we find another circumstance of voter suppression. Currently, there is a Governor’s race between Republican Candidate, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current Secretary of State, and Democratic candidate, Stacy Abrams, who is the former Minority Leader of the state House of Representatives. If she wins, she will become the first black woman to serve in this capacity.
Kemp has enacted the exact-match law suspending fifty-three thousand voter registration applications for discrepancies between applicant’s information and the governments’ information. These discrepancies range from different circumstances but are as minute as a hyphen missing in an applicant’s surname.
Abrams has been able to mobilize thousands of unregistered African Americans in the state of Georgia to register to vote. They make up thirty-two percent of the state’s population.
More recently, over 107,000 residents in Georgia were removed from voter rolls because they did not vote in previous elections. These individuals were removed under the states “use it or lose it” law which starts a process for removing residents off of voter rolls who have not voted previously or made contact with election officials over a three-year period time frame.
We have a problem here.
Midterm elections are in less than two weeks away. Where tactics of voter suppression where used in the 1800s through the 1900s, the tactics themselves did not end. This is threatening our very democracy.
Carol Anderson, the author of the book, How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, describes that circumstances of voter suppression such as the very ones in North Dakota and Georgia have “made the U.S. House of Representatives wholly unrepresentative.” She continues that “It has placed in the presidency a man who is anything but presidential. It has already reshaped the U.S. Supreme Court… and as a slew of Trump’s unqualified nominees to the federal bench gets green-lighted by a compromised Senate, it threatens to undermine the judiciary for decades to come.”
She concluded: “In short, we’re in trouble.” Are we? We move back to our original question, does every vote actually count?
Publication written and edited by Corey D. Smith and Mustafa Ali-Smith. Keep up with us on our twitter at RedesignAmerica.
