voter suppression

Voter suppression tactics jeopardize the very legitimacy of the 2020 election. They also represent an assault on human dignity and imago dei, because as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.”

Souls to the Polls is a time-honored tradition, often led by clergy, to activate and engage congregants to exercise their right to vote that starts long before Election Day. It is a mobilization strategy to make the process of voting easier for their congregants. But sadly, voter suppression efforts targeting minorities in subtle and overt ways continue to make Souls to the Polls a critical service — placing the burden of voter education and empowerment on the backs of churches and other civil society organizations, not the government. 

It just keeps happening. Voter suppression that is. Too many political leaders — who are disproportionately white — will use every option available to try and prevent some — disproportionately people of color — from voting. It just keeps happening, and many Americans either don’t know, don’t care, or wholeheartedly favor denying their fellow citizens of color the right to vote. Because it keeps happening, we must ask if support for this practice is as prevalent for white Christians as it is for white non-Christians.

WHAT DOES ELECTION-RIGGING LOOK LIKE? Often, on its face, it looks quite benign.

Take Ohio. The official elections website of Ohio’s secretary of state proclaims that “all eligible Ohioans have equal access to one of the best elections systems in the country.”

But “equal access” isn’t always what it appears.

Ohio provides only one polling station per county for early voting—which on the surface gives the impression that the system is fair and equitable. But—and here’s the rub—the counties are fundamentally different. For instance, Pickaway County, just south of Columbus, has fewer than 60,000 residents. Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located, has a population of more than 800,000 people. But each county only has one early-voting station.

The results have been predictable—and have not been race-neutral. In the 2012 presidential election, there were no lines to vote early in Pickaway County, which is 94.5 percent white. But Hamilton County, with its 206,000 African-American residents, had a line that stretched a quarter mile. According to UrbanCincy.com, voters in Cincinnati reported wait times of more than four hours, and other urban areas, such as Cleveland and Columbus, faced similar obstacles. (Comparable delays occurred in 2016.) The Republican Party chair for Columbus’ county defended the long waits, telling the Columbus Dispatch, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African American—voter turnout machine.”

Unfortunately, Ohio is not alone. According to a report in Mother Jones titled “Even Without Voter ID Laws, Minority Voters Face More Hurdles to Casting Ballots,” African Americans across the country waited about twice as long to vote as did white people in the 2012 election—and the trends are getting worse, not better. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found a strong correlation between precincts with significant minority populations and polling places that have a shortage of resources, such as voting machines and poll workers—and these are big factors in long voting lines, which tend to depress voter turnout. In South Carolina, the study found, areas with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of African-American voters than the state as a whole.

Erecting obstacles to voting—for some

Restrictions on early voting aren’t the only obstacles and inconveniences put in place in recent years. For instance, an official in Randolph County, Ga., recently proposed closing seven of the nine polling places in the county, which happens to be majority black. For many of the county’s residents, that would mean the nearest polling place would be as much as 10 miles away. For every tenth of a mile that a polling place is moved from an African-American community, the black voter turnout goes down by .5 percent, especially in poor areas where transportation options are limited. Making polling places less accessible depresses the black turnout rate. (After an outcry, Randolph County backed off its plans to eliminate polling places for the 2018 midterms.)

The “consolidation” (read: closing) of polling places isn’t limited to Georgia. After the Shelby County v. Holder decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions that used to have to go under preclearance—places that were required to have their voting changes okayed by the Department of Justice because of their problematic histories of racial discrimination—had 868 fewer polling places in the 2016 election than they did before the court’s ruling.

The startling finding of the 2000 census that by 2060 there would be no majority race in America sent shock waves through country, terrifying many white Americans. It also set in motion bold efforts to diminish the growing political power of African-American citizens. Among these were the census undercount, gerrymandering to dilute heavily black voting areas, and voter suppression. Today, at least 33 states have intentionally erected barriers to voting by enacting voter suppression laws.

IN 2016, VOTERS faced extensive efforts to make voting more difficult, particularly for people of color and those who are poor. These efforts at voter suppression occurred as a result of GOP gains in governors’ races and state legislatures while Barack Obama was president—and also as a result of the Supreme Court gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Between those two factors, 23 states—including some key battlegrounds in the presidential election—had new voter restrictions in place for the 2016 election. Examples include laws that eliminated polling places or moved them to less accessible locations, reduced polling hours, tightened voter-ID requirements, “purged” voter rolls, and reduced early voting and Sunday voting, which are popular among minority voters in certain regions.

As we approach the 2018 midterms, we need to protect the right to vote for citizens of all races, economic levels, and political persuasions. This is an imago dei issue: If we believe that all human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), then efforts to prevent some of God’s children from exercising their franchise must be opposed as a matter of fidelity to our faith. It’s also a Matthew 25 issue: If we believe that how we treat people living in poverty and those who have been caught up in the system of mass incarceration is how we treat Christ himself, then we have a clear Christian mandate to ensure that society’s most vulnerable can exercise the right to vote.

In-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare, to the tune of only 31 documented cases out of 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014. To put it another way, the odds that any given person will attempt in-person voter fraud are something like 1 in 32 million, significantly lower than the odds of being struck by lightning. Twice.

EARLIER THIS YEAR I heard Rev. William Barber of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina use the phrase “Mr. James Crow, Esq.”

Since hearing the phrase, I have been reflecting on the revised and updated name for Jim Crow, the comprehensive and brutal system of racial segregation, discrimination, and terrorist violence against black lives and bodies—explicit in the U.S. South, and often implicit in the North, throughout the 20th century.

I have been thinking about this new and more-sophisticated Mr. James Crow, wearing a white shirt and a tie instead of a white sheet and a hood and inhabiting the back rooms in state legislatures and corporate offices instead of rural backwoods lynching sites.

I’ve also been thinking about Mr. Crow’s strategy for the 2016 election and the years ahead.

Mr. James Crow’s biggest concern now is the transformational demographic shifts occurring in the United States, which by 2040 or so will see a significant milestone: For the first time, the U.S. will no longer be a white-majority nation and, instead, will be made up of a majority of minorities. That’s one of the most important facts in American political life today. This fundamental demographic shift in racial and cultural identity is underneath almost everything in U.S. politics—including the presidential election.

So with a suit instead of a sheet, how does Mr. James Crow, Esq., enact his strategy? And what are the servants of Mr. Crow saying to one another?

THIS NEW VERSION of Jim Crow has a clear, systematic strategy to protect white supremacy and promote racial segregation, discrimination, and even violence. He knows that even he, with all his power, can’t prevent the racial demographics of America from evolving. But he thinks he can obstruct and delay the changes that new racial demographics will bring to American life and politics. In apartheid South Africa, we saw that even when a racial group is in the minority, it can wield the power to oppress other races and protect its own supremacy.

Mr. James Crow’s five-part strategy includes:

Florida's policy of banning felons from voting until they petition the government is unconstitutional and forces them to "kowtow" to the whim of state politicians, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. The ruling comes in a lawsuit filed on behalf of nine ex-felons denied the right to vote.

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by Republican leaders of a federal court ruling that removed ballot restrictions in North Carolina, due to the restrictions being discriminatory along the basis of race, reports Bloomberg News.