In the US, the right-wing voter suppression efforts
reached a level not seen since the era of
segregation, when white supremacists in the
South had passed laws to deny Black Americans
the right to vote and threatened everyone who
dared to resist with violence.
The nation is now divided between people who want a
multiracial democracy in which every American
is allowed and encouraged to vote and those
who yearn for an anti-democratic system in
which an extremist white minority has
unchecked control over everyone else. The
latter group is represented by the Republican
Party, which is brazenly waging a cold civil
war by pushing for unprecedented voter
suppression measures targeting minority and
marginalised communities.
In response to the Democratic Party’s victory in the 2020
presidential and congressional elections,
Republican-controlled state legislatures have
proposed 253 bills in 43 states that aim to
prevent millions of Americans, and especially
Americans of colour, from voting in federal
and state elections.
In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp signed a law on March 25
that will, among other things, curtail early
voting, shorten the length of runoff elections
– such as the two Georgia Senate runoff
elections in the past election cycle that
allowed the Democrats to control the Senate –
and make it a crime to provide food or water
to people waiting in line to vote. In
predominantly Black and Brown Georgia
communities, voters waited in line for up to
eight hours in the 2020 elections, so these
new measures could leave thousands of them
unable or unwilling to vote in future
elections.
The law also makes producing a photo ID mandatory for
absentee voting and gives the
Republican-controlled state legislature more
control over the administration of elections.
According to critics, by expanding the state
legislature’s influence over the election
process, and making it easier for them to
remove state and local election officials
refusing to collaborate with them, the law
makes it easier for the Republicans to
overturn legitimate election results that are
not favourable to their party and agenda.
Similarly, Florida Republicans are pushing for perplexing
voting restrictions, which are trying to fix
“problems” that do not exist. Senate Bill 90,
the main vehicle for Republican-led voter
suppression in the state, for example,
proposes to ban the use of ballot drop boxes,
to prohibit anyone other than an immediate
family member from helping a voter return a
mail-in ballot, and to make a request for a
mail-in ballot valid for only one election
cycle instead of two. Republicans claim all
these measures are necessary to prevent
election fraud, even though they themselves
admit that none of these has ever caused any
significant irregularities in voting in past
elections. If this bill becomes law, however,
it is clear that it would disfranchise many
Black and other minority voters, and give the
Republicans an advantage.
In Wisconsin, whose prior voter suppression measures have
impacted Black and student voters in urban
areas, the Republicans are floating a bill
that would change requirements for
indefinitely confined voters, institute
stricter voter ID laws, and bar election
funding from private organisations, among a
variety of other things.
In Texas, once again under the guise of protecting
“election integrity”, bills have been proposed
to increase the use of “poll watchers” –
something that raises the spectre of
state-sanctioned voter intimidation. These
bills also aim to limit mail-in and curbside
voting, restrict officials from offering
unsolicited ballots and require people with
disabilities to produce a note from a doctor
or a government agency to vote absentee –
measures that would disproportionately affect
voters who are more likely to vote against the
Republicans.
In Arizona, a Republican lawmaker, Shawnna Bolick,
introduced a bill that grants the legislature
the ability to revoke the secretary of state’s
certification of the presidential election
results at any time before the inauguration of
a new president. Democratic lawmakers said if
the Republican legislature passes the bill,
they will work to defeat it by public
referendum. The state already has laws in
place that restrict minority communities’
ability to vote. The Democrats already took
two voting provisions – a policy that requires
an entire ballot to be thrown out if the
ballot was cast at the wrong precinct, and a
state law that bans the collection of ballots
by third parties, sometimes called “ballot
harvesting” – to the Supreme Court claiming
that they discriminate against racial
minorities in the state.
Iowa, too, enacted a law to preserve “election integrity”
and combat election fraud, despite no
widespread election fraud being witnessed in
the state in recent history. The law reduces
the early voting period from 29 days to 20
days, closes polling sites at 8pm rather than
9pm, and requires that mail-in ballots are
received by Election Day, rather than
postmarked by that day. And voters who do not
vote in a single election are purged from the
voter roll if they fail to reregister or
report a change of address.
Only federal intervention can stem this tide of voter
suppression and thwart the efforts of numerous
states to undermine the electoral process and
democracy.
The Democrats in Congress are already pushing for a
federal voting rights bill that would expand
federal control of local election rules.
The For the People Act aims to introduce universal
same-day and automatic voter registration,
ease voter ID requirements and expand voting
by mail and early voting. The act would also
end the gerrymandering of congressional
districts, and reform campaign finance and
government ethics laws. Another bill, the John
Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – named
after the late civil rights leader and member
of Congress – will restore the Voting Rights
Act and combat voter suppression and racially
discriminatory election laws. “We are
witnessing right now a massive and unabashed
assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve
seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow
in new clothes,” said the recently elected
Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, while
urging his colleagues to pass this
legislation.
Endangering the passage of this crucial bill are the
antiquated, undemocratic rules and structures
of the US Senate, which amplify the power of
rural, less populous and former slaveholding
states.
Specifically, a senate rule called the filibuster, which
requires 60 votes rather than a simple
majority to pass legislation, is being used by
the Republicans to block Democratic efforts to
prevent state-level voter suppression. In the
past, this rule was used by white supremacist
lawmakers to uphold slavery and racial
segregation, deny the rights of Black
Americans and block anti-lynching laws. Now it
is the most efficient tool they have to stop
the Biden administration from passing the For
The People Act. Democrats must change this
rule if they have any chance of implementing a
pro-democracy, pro-voting rights agenda.
President Joe Biden recently lambasted the
filibuster and depicted it as a relic of the
Jim Crow era in the once-segregated South. Yet
it is still not clear whether he will be able
to annul this rule.
Republicans are intent on holding on to power at all
costs, like the Afrikaners in apartheid South
Africa. The former party of Abraham Lincoln
and emancipation has decided that the best way
of dealing with the country’s changing
demographics and the growing rejection of
their core policies is to deny basic
citizenship rights to large swaths of the
population. And they are not even trying to
hide the fact that they only want a specific
subset of Americans, who support them and
their discriminatory policies, to have a say
on the country’s future.
Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, for
example, criticised Democratic efforts to
expand access to voting by baselessly claiming
that such moves would provide voting rights to
“illegal aliens” and “child molesters”. He
then revealed the real reason behind his
objection: If that happens, he said “[the
Democrats] will win and maintain control of
the House of Representatives and the Senate
and of the state legislatures for the next
century.”
Around the same time, in a Supreme Court hearing on
Arizona voting restrictions, a lawyer
representing the Arizona Republican Party
explained why the suppression measures are
necessary. “Because it puts us at a
competitive disadvantage relative to
Democrats,” said lawyer Michael Carvin.
“Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra
vote they get through unlawful interpretation
of Section 2 hurts us, it’s the difference
between winning an election 50-49 and losing
an election 51 to 50.”
America travelled down this dangerous path before.
There were hopes for the establishment of multiracial
democracy in America in the post-Civil War
Reconstruction era. In 1868, only three years
after the end of the Civil war, South Carolina
became the first US state to have a
majority-Black state legislature. By 1877,
when Reconstruction ended, it is estimated
that as many as 2,000 Black men were holding
public office across the country. But the
country did not remain on this promising path
for too long.
White supremacists swiftly retook control of the South
through the anti-Black domestic terror,
lynchings and assassinations of Black
political leaders, and voter suppression laws
including poll taxes and literacy tests. In
some states, in order to vote, Black people
had to answer ridiculous questions like how
many bubbles were on a bar of soap or how many
jelly beans were in a jar. Black people were
denied the right to vote in the South until
the civil rights movement led to the passage
of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Now, the US is repeating the mistakes of history. A
right-wing mob tried to take over the US
Capitol and deny the winner of a legitimate
and just election the presidency. They failed,
but now their lawmaker allies are trying to
overturn the will of the people through
legislation and deny millions of Americans the
right to vote. The future of America is at
stake.
This commentary is also posted on Aljazeera.com
