Almost

The impacted red state legislatures went into action immediately following the 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County vs Holder, which invalidated Sections 5 and 4(b) of the much-amended Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 required certain states and local governments (all in red states) to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices, and Section 4(b), specified the coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions were subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting.

They did everything they could to marginalize voters likely to vote against Republicans. People in urban areas or too poor to drive (and hence would not have a driver’s license), African American voters, felons whose voting rights had been restored, etc. They started with new voter ID laws, ostensibly to deter non-existent voter fraud, culled voter rolls where precise matching to residential records and voting registrations had slight differences (middle names vs middle initials for example), levied requirements on ex-felons that they could not possibly meet, reinforced and reinvigorated politically motivated gerrymandering and supported campaigns designed to discourage minority voters on the grounds that their votes wouldn’t matter anyway. Most of these efforts were or still are in courts, even the US Supreme Court where a conservative court might just support this pattern of voter denial. 

But one more subtle practice designed to keep voters from exercising their constitutional rights at the ballot box has been a bit more difficult to address in the courts: making sure that polling stations are located in venues far from where minority voters live. Georgia is a pretty typical example. 

Even though Georgia’s largest city and state capital (Atlanta), like most large cities, is blue, the state still manages to stay quite red. The close call, in the 2018 gubernatorial election, sent out a red flag to conservatives. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (left above) carefully orchestrated the culling of the state voter rolls, oddly eliminating voters from districts unlikely to support a GOP candidate. Georgia was one of those red states “liberated” from federal oversight by Shelby County vs Holder.

Particularly odd, because Kemp was also the GOP candidate for governor. His challenger, a charismatic rising star in the Democratic Party – Stacey Abrams (right above) – almost won. “On November 7, Kemp declared victory over Abrams with 50.3% of the vote versus her 48.7%, while Libertarian Ted Metz candidate trailed behind both with 0.9%. The following morning, Kemp resigned as Secretary of State. On November 13, 2018, U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May ruled that Gwinnett County violated the Civil Rights Act in its rejection of absentee ballots after U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg ruled the previous day that the votes must be counted and preserved. On November 16, every county certified their votes with Kemp leading by roughly 55,000 votes. 

Shortly after the election certification, Abrams stated that she would not concede defeat to Governor-elect Kemp, but that she would not win the election.^[5] This was the closest governor's race in Georgia since 1966… On November 16, Abrams suspended her campaign – without conceding defeat – acknowledging Kemp would be elected the next governor of Georgia, thus ending the race.” Wikipedia.

Like most of the other red states now freed of federal supervision over their election process under Shelby County, Georgia’s Republican governor and legislatures continued in their efforts to hold power, even as the numbers of voting Republicans continued to fall. Urban areas were swelling rapidly as a new Democratic power base, and Georgia was no exception. With a most significant African American population, almost entire Democrat, marginalizing that constituency was “job one” for the Republicans in control. Georgia followed that red state blueprint for minority voter suppression. 

To illustrate just how effective these efforts were, one merely has to look at a majority African American area of Hazlehurst, Georgia. In an effort to reduce costs, or so the story goes, election officials began closing what were labeled as extraneous polling stations. Strange how many of those polling sites were in minority neighborhoods. Places where folks were less likely to have cars that would be needed to reach the now-distant polling sites. The above section of Hazlehurst, for example. But people can fight back, even if Trump administration turns a blind eye to renewed voter discrimination.

“When local election officials shut down a polling site in a predominantly black area of a rural Georgia county, displaced voters couldn’t look to the federal government to intervene as it once did in areas with a history of racial disenfranchisement… So residents banded together, circulating petitions pressuring the Jeff Davis County elections board to reconsider, while advocacy groups sent pre-lawsuit demands and organized turnout at board meetings. The grass-roots struggle took two years, but county officials relented and agreed to reopen the polling site.

“With hundreds of voting sites closing or consolidating nationwide, the victory in Jeff Davis County stands out as a rare expansion of in-person voting access since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that freed Georgia and other states from the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s requirement to prove to the federal government that voting changes won’t be discriminatory.

“Most of the African American residents of Hazlehurst, about 100 miles west of Savannah amid pine forests and cotton fields, have voted at the polling site for years and were surprised when it was closed in August 2017. They were reassigned to a new, consolidated poll across town just as the Georgia governor’s race was beginning to heat up… ‘We couldn’t understand or see why the poll was closed,’ Helen Allen said in a recent interview… The 67-year-old had been voting at the little white clapboard building in a dirt lot between a cemetery and an office supply warehouse since she moved just down the road in 1982… She said some older and disabled residents became concerned about how they’d get to the new polling place. Residents began ‘talking about the hardship and how they didn’t want to go all the way across town,’ Allen said.

“Julie Houk, managing counsel for election protection for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said poll closures can create tremendous barriers for voters, especially those with low incomes or no car, and are too often carried out in minority communities.”

“Poll closures were one of several voting rights issues that arose during the heavily scrutinized 2018 governor’s race between Democrat Stacey Abrams — the nation’s first black woman to be nominated for governor from a major party — and Republican Brian Kemp, who was the state’s chief elections officer before winning that election… A plan by local elections officials to close seven of nine voting locations in majority-black Randolph County months before the election drew a national media storm. The plan was quickly sidelined after facing strong opposition from voters and civil rights groups.” Los Angeles Times, December 8^th.

Our Founding Fathers were mostly landowners with great suspicions of city-dwellers. The nation was overwhelmingly agrarian. Today, however, America is well-over 85% urban, but as a result of that ancient suspicion, an average rural voter has over 1.8 times the voting power of an urban voter. Wyoming with around 600,000 people has the same number of US Senators as does California with a population of 40 million. All over the South and Southwest, gerrymandered districts are profoundly skewed against Democrats, in many cases getting Republicans overwhelmingly elected in overwhelmingly blue areas (like Austin, Texas). It’s why the prestigious Economist labels the United States a flawed democracy, because it is not fairly representative. It is a country where the winner of the 2016 popular vote for the US presidency by almost 3 million votes lost.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and as the United States lean towards autocracy and the dominance of a minority over the majority, as polarization without compromise defines our contemporary political process, it is difficult to understand how this nation can hold together for much longer.