Unmasking Voter Suppression: The Ongoing Struggle for Democracy in America

Transcript

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The new state constitution established tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests designed specifically to shut out Black voters because they were denied the education and economic opportunities needed to be able to pay these poll taxes or pass these literacy tests.

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Within about five years, the other Southern states followed Mississippi's lead and enacted their own restrictive laws, which we know today as Jim Crow laws.

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These laws were accompanied by violence and intimidation to suppress Black voters and, unfortunately, all of these efforts worked.

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Welcome back to the United she Stands podcast, the show that brings kindness and women into politics.

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I'm Ashley.

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And I'm Sarah, and we're two women from Ohio who are here to become more educated about American politics and build a community so we can all get involved and make an impact together.

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We hope we'll inspire and empower you along the way.

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Hello and welcome back to the USS podcast.

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Today, with only a week to go until election day, we are going to talk all about voter suppression.

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We're going to start with a little bit of history on voter suppression and then spend the last half of today talking about all the shenanigans for lack of a better word that are going on around the country to suppress the vote.

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And there's a lot going on because elections are run by the states and hopefully, if you've been listening to us at all for any amount of time, you know that when the states make the rules, they all like to do things differently.

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So, before we jump in, me and Sarah are together today in person recording, and we're definitely drinking a beer.

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So let's talk about it.

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What are you?

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drinking sarah.

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I am drinking one of my favorites of all time who cooks for you?

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By jackie o's, and it's fantabulous.

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I already forget what I'm drinking.

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Sarah got me a jet lag.

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October fest is jet lag the brewery jet, no, um, it's by seven sun, okay.

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But they also have like this little, like sub brand called getaway, which is technically yeah, I actually don't know how that works it's Getaway and so and Son Nice, okay, well, it's delicious.

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I've been sipping on it as I wrapped up writing this episode just in time to record it.

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Ha ha.

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Yes, yes, so we're together, we're drinking.

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All is well, except for the fact that we're talking about voter suppression, which is not great.

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But let talking about voter suppression, which is not great, but let's first talk about what exactly is it so?

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Voter suppression is a term used to describe policies and tactics that place an unnecessary limitation on the ability of citizens to cast their vote in an election.

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Voter suppression is not a good thing for democracy.

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Our democracy works best when all citizens who are eligible to vote can do so, but unfortunately, our history is full of tactics and efforts to suppress groups of voters.

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So let's get in our time machine and go back to the very beginning of our country for a quick history lesson.

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I knew when I wrote that I was going to do that part.

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We're going to talk about a history of voter suppression here.

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So it started with the founding fathers' historic decision to not enshrine the right to vote in the United States Constitution Kicking us off here in 1787,.

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The founding fathers went back and forth over how to address suffrage in the Constitution and you're going to hear the word suffrage a lot today when you hear that it just means the right to vote in a political election.

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At the time, voting was restricted to wealthy white landowners.

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The framers debated whether it should be extended to commoners who had joined arms with them in the American Revolution, but they debated about this because those commoners might overrule their interests.

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Ultimately, they decided not to make a decision as we see in Article 1, section 4 of the Constitution.

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As we see in Article 1, section 4 of the Constitution, which declares in quotes here the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof, but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.

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So America began this great experiment of democracy in the late 1700s by granting the right to vote to a narrow subset of society, specifically white male landowners.

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Like Sarah said, in the years after our founding, voter requirements varied pretty outrageously according to the influences of individual states.

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While most expanded eligibility at first, which included ultimately providing near universal suffrage for all white men, states then quickly began to impose new restrictions In 1800, only five of 16 states had instituted white-only voting.

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But starting in 1802, every new free or slave state that joined the union, except for Maine, banned Black people from voting.

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In 1807, new Jersey, which originally gave voting rights to all inhabitants, passed a law to disenfranchise women and Black men.

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Maryland banned Jewish people from its polls until 1828.

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As you can see, states were all over the place until the end of the Civil War.

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When the Civil War ended in 1865, the federal government jumped back into the issue of who in this country had the right to vote.

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During the Reconstruction era, Congress passed a series of constitutional amendments to guarantee the rights of formerly enslaved people.

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And for those that don't know, just real quick the Reconstruction era was the turbulent time following the Civil War, from around 1865 to 1877, when the country was reintegrating southern states from the Confederacy, which included integrating 4 million newly freed people into the US.

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So back to voter suppression.

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During this time, like we said, the federal government passed what are known as the Reconstruction Amendments, and those are the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments aimed at guaranteeing the rights of formerly enslaved people and reintegrating the Southern Confederacy states.

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The 15th Amendment, specifically, was ratified in 1870, and it prohibited denying the vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude.

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Even after these amendments, women, many immigrants and Native Americans were still unable to vote.

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But with these amendments in place, black men now have the right to vote right, right, well, it seems like they should.

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It still left states in charge of elections, and do you know what states did with the power they had over these elections, sarah they?

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did the right thing and allowed everyone the ability to vote and have easy access to the ballots and all of these wonderful things right.

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Well, we wish, but really many of them soon set out to suppress these new rights granted in the Constitution.

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They did.

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But it started out okay, with mississippi even sending two black men from the republican party to the us senate, and this seems like a great win, right, I mean it is a great win.

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But surprise, surprise, it was met with backlash.

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White democrats were very unhappy with this loss of control and they took action to put a stop to it.

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So in 1875, mississippi Democrats launched a campaign of intimidation at the polls that succeeded in restoring white Democrats to power, unfortunately by 1881.

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With the intention to keep white people in power, they convened a state constitutional convention in 1890.

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Democrats widely admitted the convention was designed to circumvent the 15th amendment.

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They used the state's power to determine how and when elections would be held.

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The new state constitution established tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests designed specifically to shut out Black voters because they were denied the education and economic opportunities needed to be able to pay these poll taxes or pass these literacy tests.

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Within about five years, the other Southern states followed Mississippi's lead and enacted their own restrictive laws, which we know today as Jim Crow laws.

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These laws were accompanied by violence and intimidation to suppress Black voters and, unfortunately, all of these efforts worked.

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They did.

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By 1892, mississippi had cut the percentage of eligible Black men who were registered to vote from more than 90% to less than 6%.

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Black citizens were equally disenfranchised across the South and the conservative Southern Democratic Party surged to power For the next 70 years.

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White supremacists continued to use these voter suppression tactics to ensure their rule.

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So fast forward three-ish decades here to around 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granted American women the right to vote, and even though we didn't cover it here, women's suffrage was a right that was fought for for almost a century.

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But despite the passage of the amendment and the decades-long contributions of Black women to achieve suffrage, poll taxes, local laws and other restrictions continued to block women of color from voting Like Black men.

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Black women were also faced with intimidation and often violent opposition at the polls.

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So fast forward another four-ish decades here to the 1960s.

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After more than a decade of protests, nonviolent resistance and voter registration efforts that took place during the civil rights movement, the federal government once again got involved when it came to the rights of people to vote.

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In 1964, the states ratified the 24th Amendment, which prohibited poll taxes.

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Then, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act eliminated the remainder of the voter suppression tactics that states had been using, as well as established federal oversight over localities that had a history of voter discrimination and suppression.

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In the years that followed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the federal government took additional action to ensure citizens were able to vote.

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This included protecting the rights of voters who don't speak English to making polling places more accessible to the elderly and people with disabilities.

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Unfortunately, this trend has been reversed over the last two decades.

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Voter suppression has become an increasing point of contention.

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Republican-led state legislatures, specifically, have introduced a variety of new restrictions which make it more difficult to cast a vote, and federal oversight has been eroded, whether that's by state governments or by the courts, over the past two decades.

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Okay, so let's talk about where that leaves us today and what's been going on.

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Let's start with what voter suppression looks like today.

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We don't have poll taxes or literacy tests, so how is voter suppression still even happening?

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Well, there are several different tactics used today to suppress the vote, and the ACLU website actually lays them out pretty nicely, so we're going to use that as a source here.

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We're going to cover a few of them real quick.

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The first one is voter registration restrictions.

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Restricting the terms and requirements of registration is one of the most common forms of voter suppression.

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Restrictions can include requiring documents to prove citizenship or identification, tedious and unnecessary obstacles for voter registration drives, or even limiting the window of time in which voters can register.

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Then there's the criminalization of the ballot box.

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Some states are discouraging voter participation by imposing illogical requirements and harsh penalties on voters and poll workers who violate these rules.

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So, for example, here in Georgia, wellmakers have made it a crime to provide food and water to voters standing in line at the polls Lines that are notoriously long in Georgia, especially for communities of color Right Like.

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What is the point of?

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that rule.

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That rule is so bad, yeah, and that's just like one example, okay, so let's move on.

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The other way that votes are suppressed are voter purges, and we're going to talk a lot more about these later.

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But cleaning up voter rolls can be a responsible part of election administration, because many people do move or pass away or become ineligible to vote for various other reasons.

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But sometimes states use this process as a method of basically like mass disenfranchisement, purging eligible voters from roles for illegitimate reasons or based on inaccurate data, and often without any notice to the voter.

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A single purge can stop up to hundreds of thousands of people from voting.

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Often voters only learn they've been basically purged without reason, or shouldn't have been purged, when they show up at the poll on election day to vote, and by then it's too late to correct the error.

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Then there's our favorite gerrymandering and redistricting.

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So too often, states use redistricting as a political tool to manipulate the outcome of elections, and that's called gerrymandering and that which we all know.

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But we are going to beat into everyone's heads so widespread undemocratic practice that's stifling the voices of millions of voters.

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And while this doesn't technically stop someone from voting, gerrymandering does skew the election results and hinders the will of voters.

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So, moving on to another suppression tactic, and that is voter ID laws.

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36 states have identification requirements at the polls.

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Some states have strict photo ID laws under which voters must present one of a limited set of forms of government issued photo ID in order to cast a regular ballot, with no exceptions.

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These strict ID laws are part of an ongoing strategy to suppress the vote.

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And maybe you're thinking but don't we need to know who people are to make sure our elections are fair?

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Yes, we do.

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That's a great question and it's a good point, but here's the problem Over 21 million US citizens so people who are eligible to vote do not have qualifying, government-issued photo identification, and these individuals are disproportionately voters of color.

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That's because ID cards aren't always accessible for everyone.

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The ID itself can be costly and even when IDs are free, applicants must incur other expenses to obtain the underlying documents that are needed to get that ID.

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This can be a significant burden on people in lower-income communities, not to mention the travel required to obtain an ID is typically an obstacle for people with disabilities, sometimes the elderly, and people who live in rural areas.

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At the end of the day, strict voter ID laws suppress millions of people's vote.

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So those are some of the ways voter suppression is still happening today in the US.

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Like we mentioned, over the last 20 years, states have put various forms of these barriers in front of the ballot box.

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These efforts, which have also received boosts from certain Supreme Court rulings which have eroded some of the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, have kept significant numbers of eligible voters from the polls, hitting all Americans but placing special burdens on racial minorities, poor people and young and old voters.

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So let's move into even more present-day territory.

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Since just 2020, we've seen some more extreme attempts to suppress the vote, mostly by Republican state legislatures, under the guise of the big lie.

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And you know the big lie the one where the 2020 election was stolen and our elections are now secure, free or fair.

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To be blatantly clear.

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This is completely false.

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Our elections are secure and free and fair.

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The Brennan Center's report, the Truth About Voter Fraud, conclusively demonstrated that most allegations of fraud turn out to be baseless.

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Numerous other studies, including one commissioned by the Trump administration, have reached the same conclusion.

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But back to the point here.

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Using this big lie, voting rights and accessibility to the ballot have significantly been attacked in the past four years.

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Limiting absentee voting has been the most prevalent tactic, while several of these states have also enacted laws that permit partisan interference in elections or threaten the people and processes that make those elections work.

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Let's look at just a few examples, and we'll start with Arizona.

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This year, arizona will have at least four new restrictive laws in place that were not in effect in 2020.

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Two of them make it more difficult to correct absentee ballot signature defects, which could affect many voters.

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In a state where more than 75% of people vote by mail, that's actually a crazy stat that was like crazy when I read that.

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I was like, wow, that's a lot of vote by mail, yeah, okay.

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So now let's look at georgia as an example and oh, georgia, you've really made a mess of things.

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You're going to come up again later in our conversation, but let's go back to 2021.

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In early 2021, the georgia legislature passed senate bill 202 and this is a 98 page law that took aim at all sorts of ways people vote for mail voting.

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Specifically, it cuts the window to request a ballot by more than half, it requires counties to wait longer to mail out.

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Specifically, it cuts the window to request a ballot by more than half, it requires counties to wait longer to mail out ballots and it severely restricts the availability of dropbox locations and polling hours, especially in large cities.

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Many of these provisions are in response to the 2020 election, when Georgians voted by mail in unprecedented numbers in certain areas, widely distributed dropboxes, like Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.

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In August of 2024, georgia's state election board, which is made up of a three Republican majority, who Donald Trump has shouted out by name voted to require county election officials to make a reasonable inquiry before certifying election results to the state.

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Many critics, including voting rights advocates, say the board is defying state law that says that county officials in quotes shall certify results.

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Aka it's not their job to question the votes, it's their job to count them and certify according to state law, and the courts back this up.

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More than a century of court precedent have found county officials have little wiggle room on this issue.

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At the end of the day, this is really just a play for Georgia officials to not certify the election results if they don't like them.

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Election deniers have made their way into election boards to make this sort of thing possible.

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And these are just two different states with examples.

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Unfortunately, these types of things are happening all around the country, moving on from, while specifically attacking voting rights and electoral processes, the other main attack we're seeing is with voter purges.

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Yeah, so, like we kind of talked about earlier, voter purges are happening all over the country.

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States have removed more than 19 million people, or about 8.5% of the registered US electorate, from voter rolls between the 2020 and 2022 election cycle.

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So that's not even a stat for what has happened in the last two years, and they've oftentimes done this via flawed practices that prevent many eligible people from exercising their right to vote.

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A report called Protecting Voter Registration an Assessment of Voter Purge Policies in 10 States from the Think-Take Demos examines how voters are removed from electoral rules in Arizona, california, georgia, indiana, louisiana, michigan, north Carolina, ohio, texas and Wisconsin Demos graded the states on a percentage point scale in four categories Voter removal practices, safeguards against erroneous removal, data accessibility and data transparency.

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In the removal practices category, indiana received the highest score, earning a 76% rating, while Ohio, which scored 24%, ranked the lowest.

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Boo Boo.

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For safeguards, wisconsin received a 90% rating, while six states tied for last with a 20% score.

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North Carolina and Ohio got perfect 100% scores for data accessibility, so I guess that's a great win there's that.

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Yep, while Indiana received a 0% rating.

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Not so hot.

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North Carolina and Georgia received perfect scores for data transparency, and Indiana got another 0% mark.

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So things aren't all that bad and we know voter purges are necessary, but there is definitely room for foul play, and that's what we're seeing play out in states across the US, specifically led by Trump and the RNC, under the rouse of any ideas.

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I have ideas.

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Let's hear them.

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I think it might be that whole like the election was stolen thing.

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You're right.

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It's still the big lie.

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The election was stolen, illegals are voting, blah, blah, blah.

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Things we know are not true and there's no evidence for.

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So, like other efforts to uncover mass illegal voting in America, including the voter fraud commission that Trump launched himself when he was president, that found no mass fraud.

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By the way, the GOP hunt for illegal voters hasn't panned out, but they are still doing as much damage to suppress votes as possible by waging this war on the nation's voter rolls.

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Out of 7.7 million registered voters, North Carolina's Board of Elections found nine were potentially non-citizens, though officials haven't even been able to confirm the status of those nine.

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In Ohio.

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Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose Boo.

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Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

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He has removed roughly 155,000 voters who he claimed appeared inactive in elections since 2020.

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So, basically, if you didn't vote outside of the presidential elections which a lot of people don't then you might have been basically booted from the rolls for no other reason.

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And back to Georgia.

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The names of more than 100,000 eligible voters were removed.

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More than 40,000 eligible voters were removed.

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More than 40,000 voters were alerted that they got booted and re-registered to vote and these 40,000 voters that re-registered came across no issues re-registering to vote and they were all eligible voters.

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So why were they removed in the first place?

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That's a good question Okay.

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Moving on to another example, In Nevada, Republicans were able to remove roughly 100,000 inactive voters earlier this year, but that wasn't good enough for Team Trump.

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This summer, the former president's campaign and the RNC sued Nevada's Secretary of State, arguing they had evidence of thousands of non-citizens on Nevada's voter rolls who may be able to cast ballots this November.

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In the suit, Trump lawyers claimed 4,000 non-citizens voted in 2020, even as they had zero, zero evidence to back that up.

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So, as you can see, voter purges, which really is a necessary process, is now being weaponized by the GOP.

00:20:19.154 --> 00:20:22.021
So let's do a nice little summary for y'all here.

00:20:22.021 --> 00:20:29.275
The US has a long history of voter suppression, but in the back half of the 1900s we were working towards progress for sure.

00:20:29.275 --> 00:20:40.675
But unfortunately, the past two decades have seen renewed attacks on voting rights, especially within the last four years, since Trump and the GOP have continued to spread lies about the security of our election processes.

00:20:40.675 --> 00:20:46.616
They have spread doubt and enabled chaos and nefarious activities to truly threaten people's rights to vote.

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A bit depressing but I want to leave us with this Womp womp.

00:20:49.803 --> 00:20:59.138
So I just want to end with this thought Think about how much your vote must really matter if this is the effort they're going through to suppress it.

00:20:59.138 --> 00:21:02.599
We can vote out people who don't support access to the ballot and voting rights.

00:21:02.599 --> 00:21:05.359
We can vote out people who lie and spread disinformation.

00:21:05.359 --> 00:21:10.781
Yes, this is an attack on democracy, but with the power we have via our vote, we get to put a stop to it.

00:21:11.190 --> 00:21:12.797
And we can and we will.

00:21:12.797 --> 00:21:29.131
So get out there, share this info with friends and family and share this episode with everyone you know, and let's do a thing this November and what one week from when this episode's dropped and elect competent leaders who believe in and want our democracy to be for all people.

00:21:29.811 --> 00:21:30.855
That's all we got today.

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Thank you all.

00:21:31.876 --> 00:21:33.560
And we'll catch you next time.

00:21:33.560 --> 00:21:34.282
Thank, you.

00:21:34.282 --> 00:21:44.115
Thanks for joining us for today's episode.

00:21:44.115 --> 00:21:45.681
We really appreciate the support.

00:21:46.369 --> 00:21:51.152
We would also really appreciate it if you hit the follow button and share this episode with anyone you think would enjoy it.

00:21:51.573 --> 00:21:54.424
And we'd like to thank Kevin Tanner, who edited this episode.

00:21:54.424 --> 00:21:59.642
If you're interested in learning more about him and his services, his website and Instagram are in the show notes.

00:21:59.642 --> 00:22:18.498
With that, we'll see you next week the farmers debated whether it should be extended to commoners who framers the farmers.

00:22:19.422 --> 00:22:23.653
They probably were actually farmers, probably, yeah, thank you, okay.

00:22:23.712 --> 00:22:45.816
So in 1875, mississippi, mississippi, m-i-s-s-i-s-s-p-t-a okay, nice, there's the yep, what, what, just you know, try to be natural and cool.

00:22:45.816 --> 00:22:50.381
What, what, what, which.

00:22:50.381 --> 00:22:52.343
I'm a little warm, so maybe that's also why it's cold.

00:22:52.343 --> 00:22:53.183
I don't know, I don't know.

00:22:53.183 --> 00:22:55.286
Croatia, croatia, rosacea.

00:22:59.790 --> 00:23:01.778
No, I don't have Croatia, I have Rosacea.

00:23:03.809 --> 00:23:13.251
Contrary to popular belief, it's not called Croatia oh my God Got it.

00:23:13.251 --> 00:23:13.753
That's so popular belief.

00:23:13.753 --> 00:23:14.576
It's not called croatia oh my god got it.

00:23:14.576 --> 00:23:15.662
Okay, I don't even remember where I was, okay in august.

00:23:15.662 --> 00:23:16.285
Okay, wait, why are you laughing?

00:23:16.285 --> 00:23:16.645
Did I fuck it up?

00:23:16.645 --> 00:23:16.988
No, no, you didn't.

00:23:16.988 --> 00:23:20.099
I'm just laughing that, if you like, used that part in a reel.

00:23:20.099 --> 00:23:25.317
It would be funny, because I it would have started with my beer in my hand and then I already know I would comment whoa, how did my beer in my hand?

00:23:25.337 --> 00:23:28.326
And then I already know I would comment Whoa, how did my beer get there?

00:23:29.991 --> 00:23:30.795
Well, now I have to do it.

00:23:32.390 --> 00:23:34.417
Yes, you have to Okay.