Can you remember the celebration and fanfare surrounding the 2008 election as so many first-time Black voters came to the polls to elect the first Black man to the presidency? Can you remember 2012 when the Black voter record was broken again? Can you remember wondering what happened to all these Black voters in 2016, as their turn-out at the polls dipped for the first time in over 20 years, and by over 7%? Did you think that maybe the Black population just wasn’t that excited about Hillary? Or maybe worse, that they were being complacent after a double Obama victory? Ashamedly, that thought crossed my mind.
What I didn’t realize was that in 2013 the Supreme Court essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act which gave the federal government the role of supervising voting in parts of the country known to have practiced racial discrimination in voting via acts of violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, knowledge and understanding tests as well as good character tests. The protections offered by the Voting Rights Act helped boost Black voter participation, which had been negligible in the South since post-Reconstruction when the Southern States adopted regulations such as those outlined in the Mississippi Plan which worked, according to Virginia representative Carter Glass, “to discriminate to the very extremity … permissible … under… the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.” The laws were quite successful. In Louisiana, for example, there were more than 130,000 blacks registered to vote in 1896 and in 1904, after the adoption of the Mississippi plan, that number dropped to 1,342. These stats are from Carol Anderson’s book, One Person, No Vote.
The Supreme Court decided in 2013 via Shelby County v. Holder that the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required the US DOJ to approve any changes in voting procedures before they could be implemented, was unfair and was unneeded because since the time of its inception Blacks were voting in record numbers and were winning plenty of elections. It is true that the Voting Rights Act and the involvement of the federal government increased Black voter turnout and civic engagement tremendously,— in Dallas County, home of Selma, Black voter registration increased from 2% in 1965 to 67% in 1972 (Lewis and Allen 1972).
Not coincidentally, the decreased Black voter turnout for the 2016 election was the first presidential election in over fifty years held without federal oversight to protect Black, minority and poor voters from voter discrimination. Without needing to get pre-clearance from the federal government for new voting regulations, 14 states, Nebraska included, adopted new voting restrictions. Poor and minority voters faced strict Voter ID laws, found themselves purged from the voting rolls and showed up to closed or relocated polling places. No wonder the Black voter numbers were down. In Wisconsin, which enacted both Voter ID law as well as decreased and restricted hours voting hours (Brennan Center for Justice), Black voting rates decreased from 78% in 2012 to 50% in 2016. In Milwaukee County alone, which is majority African American, fifty thousand fewer votes were cast in a state that Donald Trump won by only twenty-seven thousand ballots.
I asked my friends on Facebook to share with me what democracy meant to them, and I heard varying versions of the phrase “government for the people by the people.” I think this idea of a democracy being a government in which the populace participates is pretty widely shared, but upon taking a close look at our nation’s (very recent) history, as well as history in the making, it appears the government may not be for or by all people.
Here in Nebraska Senator Slama has proposed a constitutional amendment, LR3CA, that would require poll workers to review a photo or digital ID to verify voter eligibility. While this doesn’t sound crazy to many, for lots of people getting to a DMV and locating a birth certificate are difficult. It requires flexible daytime hours, money (which essentially equates to a poll tax) and transportation. Because this amendment is not needed – we have never had a single conviction of voter impersonation in the state of Nebraska- this requirement can only have been born out of a desire to suppress the votes of those who are already less privileged, those of minorities, differently-abled, elderly and rural voters.
If you value democracy as a government for all the people by all the people, I encourage you to reach out to your Nebraska state senator and let them know you don’t support poll taxes or voter suppression.