Racist voter suppression, which is still a contributing factor to inequality, has a long and shameful history in U.S. elections. Before the Civil War, the North-South constitutional compromise gave 3/5 representation in national elections to slaves in the South who, of course, couldn’t vote. After the Civil War, the voting imbalance for national elections became even worse because former slaves were now counted for complete representation but still couldn’t vote. During the hundred year Jim Crow era, this disenfranchisement was enforced by procedural barriers, extreme intimidation, including the KKK and lynching, and outrageous Supreme Court decisions. Throughout the states of the old Confederacy, these abuses, reinforced by extreme economic and educational repression, continued unabated until the mid-20th Century. Even by 1944, only 5% of age-eligible African-American voters were registered to vote.
The voting Rights Act of 1965 was an effort to end racist voter suppression. Along with Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 it was part of the campaign to end the hundred year Jim Crow system of pervasive racist segregation, blatantly unequal education, restricted employment, judicial abuse, and voter suppression of African-Americans in the South. Southern Whites responded to this campaign with rage and intense resistance by mobs, police departments, and leading politicians at all levels of government. In 1956, 101 members of congress, all from states of the old Confederacy, signed the Southern manifesto in defiance of the Supreme Court. Public schools were shut down and their funding diverted to vouchers for segregationist private schools. A multitude of defiant state and local laws and police and mob violence led to massive clashes and unpunished murder against civil rights advocates, and eventually the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Within about a decade, this overt racism mostly gave way to still pervasive covert racism that relied on implicit (dog whistle) rather than explicit terms to support racist policies, including voter suppression. This transition was reflected in Nixon’s cynical Southern Strategy to capture votes influenced by racism. As his chief advisor John Ehrlichman explained, the point was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.” Most southern politicians quickly embraced these ideas while rejecting the civil rights laws and Great Society of the Democrats. Consequently, the formerly solidly democratic South became solidly Republican instead. In addition, Nixon managed to name four justices to the Supreme Court who supported this agenda, despite the rejection of two of his nominees for previous segregationist activity.
Thus the stage was set for the Regan administration to continue the reversal of the earlier civil rights gains. Fears that African-American’s gains could come only at white’s expense were shamelessly exploited with code words like “welfare queens, reverse discrimination, and affirmative action.” This was done to elicit support for cutting taxes by gutting the safety net and for consolidating Republican control by limiting civil rights protections, including for minority voting. The Great Society and civil rights laws had been developed to ameliorate hundreds of years of violent and corrosive repression that resulted in up to $24 trillion in multigenerational African-American devastation from lost wages, stolen land, educational impoverishment, and housing inequalities. Yet, this uncontestable history was callously disregarded to present the claim that it was actually the much better off whites who were the victims because of government handouts to lazy blacks.
Although the usual techniques for voter suppression like poll taxes, literacy tests, and understanding clauses were hampered by the Voting Rights Act, many other forms of voter suppression remained well established. A relatively recent innovation, particularly after the election of an African-American president in 2008, was the requirement for government-issued photo IDs. This was said to be necessary to discourage voter registration fraud, although there were only 26 convictions for fraud or 0.00000013% from 197 million federal votes from 2002 to 2005. These requirements prey on the structural difficulties, some imposed by cynical Republican governments, for impoverished minorities to obtain photo IDs. Reportedly, roughly 25% of black, 16% of Latino, and only 8% of white voters are without a current, government-issued ID. Countering this and other forms of voter suppression became more difficult after the 2013 Supreme Court ruling, in which the conservative and libertarian majority of the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, particularly its preclearance provision for states with a history of abuses.
Despite all of this, the key to voter suppression remains the severe socio-economic disadvantage of minorities, particularly African-Americans, as a result of growing inequality (enhanced by voter suppression) and the devastating residue of centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Those in power use congressional redistricting to minimize minority representation. They limit the locations and hours of voting stations so minorities must miss work, travel long distances, and wait in long lines to vote. They send mass mailings to minority neighborhoods and remove names from the rolls when return to sender cards came back. (This technique resulted in removal of 180,000 names in Florida in 2012, of which only 85 were found to be correctly identified.) They create requirements for W2 forms, bank statements, and utility bills that are difficult for minorities who are unemployed, less likely to have bank accounts, and who live in multigenerational housing.
Global economist Branko Milanovic, who studies inequality, regards this kind of voter suppression as a major tool of the plutocrats entrenched at the top of US government to facilitate the growing inequality that benefits them. He points out that the overlapping influence of race and class has resulted in the overwhelming difference of voting of 80% for the top decile and only 40% for the lowest decile. As conservative activist Paul Weyrich, whose ALEC drafted model voter-ID legislation, has said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. (GOP) leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”