This is a long blog, but without sufficient background, my words would simply lack context and meaning. Bear with me. When post-Civil War freed slaves (13th Amendment) were given U.S. citizenship (the 14h Amendment which also recognized “equal protection”), that included the right to vote (the 15th Amendment). But after just a few years, all over the South, well-armed Democratic “poll watchers” – there to protect “election integrity” – made it absolutely clear that African Americans would never be allowed to enter the polling station. Those Black Americans who persisted could easily find themselves at the end of a noose. The Jim Crow era saw actual statutes being passed (1877 into the early 20th century) that effectively denied African Americans the ability to cast their ballots, sometimes by charging a poll tax that former slaves were unable to pay or by imposing various tests clearly aimed at excluding Black voters.
Howard University School of Law summarizes the post-Civil War efforts to stop Black Americans from voting: “After the Civil War, there was a period from about 1865 to 1877 where federal laws offered observable protection of civil rights for former slaves and free blacks; it wasn't entirely awful to be an African American, even in the South. However, starting in the 1870s, as the Southern economy continued its decline, Democrats took over power in Southern legislatures and used intimidation tactics to suppress black voters. Tactics included violence against blacks and those tactics continued well into the 1900s. Lynchings were a common form of terrorism practiced against blacks to intimidate them. It is important to remember that the Democrats and Republicans of the late 1800s were very different parties from their current iterations. Republicans in the time of the Civil War and directly after were literally the party of Lincoln and anathema to the South. As white, Southern Democrats took over legislatures in the former Confederate states, they began passing more restrictive voter registration and electoral laws, as well as passing legislation to segregate blacks and whites…
“The era of Jim Crow laws saw a dramatic reduction in the number of blacks registered to vote within the South. This time period brought about the Great Migration of blacks to northern and western cities like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence and spread all over the country, finding a significant popularity that has lingered to this day in the Midwest. It was claimed at the height of the second incarnation of the KKK that its membership exceeded 4 million people nationwide. The Klan didn't shy away from using burning crosses and other intimidation tools to strike fear into their opponents, who included not just blacks, but also Catholics, Jews, and anyone who wasn't a white Protestant.”
Woe to anybody who was in an excluded class where there KKK was prominent; if exclusionary statutes were not enough, violent intimidation was fiercely applied. Even where violent suppression did not exist, segregation was legally enforced across the land, particularly in former Confederate states in the South. Facilities, accommodations, schools, churches, entire neighborhoods, public transportation, military units and even water fountains were clearly established as “Whites only” and excluded “Negroes” and “Colored.” The ignominious 1896 Plessy vs Fergusson Supreme Court ruled that segregation did not violate the Constitution; “separate but equal” was the law of land. It was not until Plessy was reversed in a litany of civil rights laws and cases (for example, the seminal Brown vs Board of Education, a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation) that the United States began to grapple with the lasting aftereffects of slavery and Jim Crow laws and attitudes.
Oddly, by the mid-to-late 20th century, the Republicans and the Democrats switched sides on voter exclusion and racial inequities. As the GOP coopted the evangelical dominance in the South (an exceptionally conservative universe) in the 1960s to replace the Democratic “machine politics” in that region, Republicans seemed willing to adopt racist exclusion as part of their pitch to Southern (white) voters. The Democrats may have led the charge in the 1960s for civil rights and voting rights legislation, but red states (now Republican) continued exclusionary practices resulting in minorities’ being prevented from exercising their right to vote.
In 2013, the Supreme Court (Shelby County vs Holder) struck down provisions of the highly amended Voting Rights Act of 1965 that imposed federal oversight on enumerated states that practiced clear voter discrimination. As soon as federal oversight was lifted, most of those controlled states immediately began to pass new voter suppression laws. To make matters so much worse, a newly configured radical activist right-wing Supreme Court (Brnovich vs DNC – 2021) actually approved the kinds of voting restrictions that the Voting Rights Act had been passed to eliminate. Unless a statute imposing a voting restriction clearly stated a constitutionally prohibited provision (which would, in this case, have had to name the precise class minority voters being suppressed), Brnovich held the statutorily restriction that actually created that result could not be considered.
It's important to be aware of the legacy of voter suppression in Southern states, a practice that seems to have added as a fundamental platform in modern day red states. To this day, there are few Republican elected officials who will openly admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the November presidential election. Instead, they almost uniformly parrot Donald Trump’s dramatically unfounded proposition that the election was rigged and determined solely by voter fraud. The “big lie.” To insure “honest and transparent” elections – despite no proof of any significant voter fraud – red states have passed or are in the process of passing new highly controversial and restrictive laws making it very difficult for minority voters to cast the ballots.
For red states fighting the “culture wars,” it is important to understand that the desire to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in public schools is predicated on a number of false narratives. Primary among them is that racism in the United States ended in the 1960s with the passage of the civil and voting rights legislation. Seriously? We almost instantly erased centuries of slavery as well as legal and systematic racism, changing all American attitudes, with a couple of statutes and Supreme Court cases? If you want to read an excellent analysis of the evolution of critical race theory, please see the excellent New Yorker piece, entitled “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory” by Jelani Cobb, published September 13th: the frustrating story of civil rights triumphs serially and consistently undone in whole or in part after seeming progress. Every time.
Among the most heinous provisions in most of these new voter restriction bills are the open encouragement of ordinary citizens, some with training and others without, to service as partisan poll watchers, able to photograph and record all aspect of poll station activity except the actual vote behind a partition. Combined with some of these states’ right to carry guns (concealed or open carry), the notion of a poll watcher takes on a sinister connotation, even where these poll watchers are not allowed to speak to voters. They are expected to record “irregularities” at the polls, presumably to assure fairness, but in fact to build bodies of “evidence” to establish voter fraud in case their Republican candidate loses the relevant election.
The Texas version of this law provides partisan poll watchers must be allowed "free movement" at polling places… except for being able to watch a voter cast their ballot at a voting station. They are “entitled to sit or stand near enough to see and hear the activity” at the polling place.
Almost immediately after Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the comprehensive voter suppression act on September 7th, GOP operatives in that state set about addressing the rise of Democratic victories in most of the large cities. “Common Cause Texas on Thursday [9/9] shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist…
“The unnamed GOP official explains in the video that the goal is to build an ‘election integrity brigade’ of ‘motivated and highly competent folks’ in Harris County—which includes Houston, the Lone Star State's most populous city—who will ‘safeguard... our voting rights.’” AlterNet.com, September 9th.
Think this is only happening in red states? Republicans angry at California’s liberal tradition, also used “poll watching” to gather evidence of election fraud in the September 14th recall election that retained Democrat Gavin Newsom with almost a two to one margin, effectively against the GOP front-runner challenger, right-wing Larry Elder. Elder is himself a rare African American who supports banning the teaching of critical race theory. Had Newsom not survived the recall vote, a much lower vote for Elder would, under California’s bizarre recall procedure, have seated Elder as the replacement governor. Unsurprisingly, California polls reflect a popular sentiment to rewrite this recall legislation.
Prior to the election, Elder claimed that he might not respect the results, but the margin of victory was so wide that even Elder conceded but could not resist adding “we may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war.” What war? Disinformation? Challenging all major Democratic victories as “rigged”? A genuine violent right-wing insurrection? Was Elder vying for a slot on the 2024 GOP ticket? But Elder clearly expressed one post-2020 election sustaining GOP goal: suppression of voters who might oppose GOP issues and candidates.
“Statewide, nearly half a dozen California groups are currently running election fraud campaigns, though poll observer logs from four counties — Orange, San Diego, Fresno and San Luis Obispo — show the vote watchers hail almost exclusively from one organization: the Election Integrity Project.
“The organization, which grew out of the tea party movement, says it has trained some 4,000 observers to police the recall, including 300 in Los Angeles County, though reports suggest the numbers of observers showing up so far are a fraction of that. Still, some registrars are concerned the group’s claims about problems with mailed ballots will discourage people from voting and undermine confidence in the election process.
“The state Republican Party has launched its own election fraud program, as have leaders of several conservative political action committees. They are competing for the attention and donations of a common conservative base. In that close environment, Election Integrity Project requires that its volunteers sign a form agreeing not to share what they see with other election watch groups.” Los Angeles Times, September 11th. It seems that voter suppression, nullification and intimidation – trying to make a case why losing Republican candidates should be declared the actual winners in elections – appears to be the most basic and recent tenet of a Republican Party that seems to believe it could never really win a fair major election otherwise.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if you think you live in a democracy, a bona fide two-party system, think again.
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