Voting Rights Are Under Attack In Alabama And Across The Nation
March 7 marks the 53rd anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the voting rights march in Selma that ended in ferocious violence by state troopers against peaceful protesters and moral leaders. As midterm primaries approach, we examine the state of voting rights today, and the many self-inflicted challenges to our country’s democracy.
By Stephanie Frescas
Faya Rose Touré had worked tirelessly leading up to December 12. Grassroots organizing for voter education is work she takes seriously. She’s passionate about voting rights, and, alongside her decades-long career as a high-profile attorney, has been an important leader in its promotion. After leading the “Vote or Die” campaign to motivate and prepare poor black, brown, and white communities to participate in Alabama’s special election for Senate for months, the only thing left for her to do was to vote herself.
“I went to a voting place in Orville, I had my ‘Vote or Die’ sign on my husband’s car,” Touré recalls. “This white man comes up, he hits my car. I hear this sound — woop — and next thing I know, my ‘Vote or Die’ sign was on the ground. And then, he said, ‘Someone’s going to die here tonight, someone’s going to be killed,’ clearly talking about me.”
The man then went in to vote, so Touré asked the voting officials there, who she noticed were all white, for help. She says they refused to cooperate. “And this didn’t happen 50 years ago, this type of intimidation still takes place.”
Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution demands that, “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican [representative] Form of Government.” The 15th amendment prohibits state or federal governments from denying or restricting the right to vote based off race. But even though poll taxes and literacy tests may be in the past, it has become more and more clear that racist voter suppression efforts still cloud elections in the United States. So-called “voter fraud” is a lie and the language that has been promoted by the White House and extremists in the Republican-led Congress. In contrast, “voter suppression” is dangerous, real, and alive today. Not just from individual citizens like Touré faced, but as part of systemic efforts led by extremists politicians on all levels of government.
One example is perfectly shown in an experience Touré’s husband had while trying to vote in the same Senate election. Her husband, state Senator Hank Sanders, found that he had been marked as an “inactive voter.”
“He had never missed,” Touré insists. “[But] he had to vote a provisional ballot.”
At the beginning of 2017, Alabama’s extremist Secretary of State, John Merrill, began a multi-step process of purging inactive voters from rolls. As Touré’s husband, along with many others, showed, the process was prone to error, and wrongly forced many active voters to follow a long, confusing, alternative route to submit their vote. This purging is an example of the many suppressive voting practices taken up by states once the 1965 Voting Rights Act was weakened.
Section 5 of the VRA required states with a history of racial discrimination to get federal permission before making changes to their voting laws or practices, and prove the changes would not discriminate based on race or minority status. In 2013, the Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder, struck down section 4(b), which outlined the formula that preserved this requirement. Section 4(b) had marked out states with a history of voter suppression, like imposing literacy tests, or only providing election materials in English to areas with large populations of communities of colors. Between 1965 and 2013, 3,000 election procedure changes were blocked by the VRA. But the Supreme Court struck down the formula as unconstitutional, deeming it outdated. So, now no states have to get preclearance. Notably, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion that “Congress may draft another formula based on current conditions.” Though Congress has had five years since Chief Justice Roberts said this, legislators have failed to pass a replacement. “Long before this current president, the legislature — the Senate leaders, the current leadership in Congress — have blocked fixing the Voting Rights Act, since June 23, 2013,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President and Senior Lecturer at Repairers of the Breach, and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival. “This means they have blocked fixing the Voting Rights Act for over 1,566 days as of March 7, 2018, the 53rd anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Strom Thurman only filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 24 hours and yet extremists in the Republican-led congress have filibustered for more than 1,566 days.”
During this time, states with a history of voter suppression have shown why a new version of section 4(b) is so necessary, rolling out dozens of suppressive voting laws and practices. Multiple states eliminated same-day registration, cut back early-voting periods, and implemented photo ID laws once they no longer had to prove these changes wouldn’t negatively impact communities’ of color abilities to vote.
In Alabama’s last election, for example, dangerous voter suppression tactics were alive and well. There was the confusion around “inactive” voters. There was the confusion around poll workers mistakenly turning away voters whose address on their photo ID’s didn’t match their voter’s registration information, even though the only supposed purpose of the photo ID law is to confirm identity. There was the confusion around violations of the new law against cross-party voting, which the Secretary of State quickly announced would be fully prosecuted before it turned out that there were no violations, only a misreading of some clerical marks.
The actions of Alabama lawmakers, however, show that this was not accidental confusion. This is part of a wide-reaching voter suppression strategy. All of this confusion was caused by roadblocks put in place to discourage voting in some way.
“Right after the election, the Secretary of State made this great pronouncement that he had identified several hundred potential cross-over votes and that those people, if found to have engaged in cross-over voting, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including being thrown in prison for five years.” Randall Marshall, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, explains. “When all was said and done, they didn’t identify anybody who actually willfully went and engaged in cross-over voting…But the Secretary of State’s office getting the word out that, if you voted wrongly, you could be prosecuted and thrown in prison for five years is hardly the way to encourage people to go vote.”
This Secretary of State in particular, Secretary John Merrill, has shown again and again that he fully embraces the extremist agenda of suppressing the votes of poor whites and communities of color. He’s against automatic voter registration when a person turns 18, claiming it would “cheapen” the work of civil rights icons like Congressman John Lewis, even though Congressman John Lewis has been in favor of automatic voter registration since at least 1976. After all, the 26th amendment determined that 18 was the age when people became eligible to vote, no amendment talks about “having to get up off your rear” as a requirement to vote, which Merrill told a filmmaker in 2016. In spite of what the Secretary believes, you do get to vote just because you’re 18. But, he continued his argument to say, on camera, “As long as I’m the Secretary of State of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state.”
All political leaders should be invested in making voting as easy as possible. We need our representatives to truly represent our interest. To guarantee our right to vote as soon as we turn 18. To extend early voting so that casting a ballot isn’t a nightmare of scheduling for people with jobs, school, or children — or all three. We see proof of how feasible this is, and what a positive enforcement of our democracy it could be; 15 states, and the District of Columbia, allow same-day voter registration. These states saw an “average of a 5 percent increase” in voter turnout after implementing this policy.
But then, of course, we have politicians like Secretary John Merrill, who praised Alabama’s dangerous photo ID law at Brown Chapel in Selma last year, on the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” This photo ID law was written in 2011, but Alabama’s state legislature didn’t even try to get it approved by the federal government, as they then had to do. They put it in place one day after the VRA was weakened and they didn’t have to get permission. This enough is a giveaway that it was a law intentionally designed for voter suppression, but the impact of it on Alabama, and various states, were able to implement it is undeniable proof that it serves this purpose. The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival Report, “The Souls of Poor Folk” gathered the results of various studies into voter suppression, including one by the University of California San Diego that found that voter ID laws “doubled the turnout gap between whites and Latinos in the general elections, and almost doubled the white-black turnout gap in primary elections.” College students have also struggled to vote, since nine states that require photo ID to vote don’t accept student ID. And there’s the firsthand reports of women struggling to vote because the name in their photo ID doesn’t match voter records perfectly (either due to marriage or divorce).
With all this in mind, Rev. Dr. Barber walked out in protest of Secretary Merrill’s comments.
“When I spoke in Brown Chapel on Sunday morning, I said our history demands we confront the hypocrisy of those who claim to honor the martyrs of Selma while working against the political power they fought to secure,” Rev. Dr. Barber explained in an Op-Ed published in the Montgomery Advertiser. “When Secretary Merrill stood in the pulpit after me and touted the voter suppression bill he sponsored in the Alabama statehouse, I could not stay silent. I understand that my action, along with those of dozens who joined me by walking out in protest, disrupted the decorum of a service. But the blood of Selma’s martyr’s would not let us sit quietly.”
In the same Op-Ed, Rev. Dr. Barber warns that voter suppression is often hidden under a mask of civility — that it has historically been upheld “not with the violence of the klan but with the courteous and respectable arguments of lawyers and politicians.” Increasingly though, the mask has been pulled back, sometimes by the politicians themselves.
In 2011, then-Alabama State Senator Scott Beason wore a wire for a vote-buying case. With that wire, he recorded himself calling black people “aborigines”, and discussing with others a fear that putting a gambling referendum on a ballot would attract black voters.
In 2015 31 Alabama driver’s license offices — where voters could get an acceptable photo ID — were shut down in Alabama. This included “every county in which African Americans are 70 percent or more of the population,” according to Alabama’s ACLU. It also closed down offices in 8 out of the ten poorest counties in Alabama. In reaction to massive backlash, the offices were re-opened with barebone hours. Even though U.S. Department of Transportation officials then made the state extend these hours, they are still currently very meager — as the ACLU points out: “A person in Sumter County, which is majority African American, can only visit the driver’s license office on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month from 8–12pm or 12:30–2:30pm to get a driver’s license or non-driver ID.”
Early last year, a federal court ruled that Alabama had to redraw legislative districts because they were racially gerrymandered.
But of course, Alabama is not the only place where racist efforts of voter suppression are being pushed forward. It’s important to remember that during the proceedings of Shelby v. Holder, when the Supreme Court stripped down the VRA, Justice Antonin Scalia said that the Court had to rescue Congress from the trap of being afraid to vote against a “racial entitlement.”
The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights surveyed 381 of the 800 counties previously covered by Section 5 where polling place information was available in 2012 or 2014 and found there are 868 fewer places to cast a ballot in 2016 in these areas.
According to “The Souls of Poor Folk,” 23 states have passed racist voter suppression laws since 2010, including laws making it hard to register, reducing early voting days and hours, and more restrictive voter ID laws.
The situation is far from hopeless, however. Enthusiastic and courageous supporters of voting rights have led to multiple important victories against a wide range of efforts to suppress the votes of poor whites and communities of color.
Rev. Dr. Barber led the highly publicized fight against the sweeping voter suppression bill HB 589 in North Carolina. He explained the outrageous extent of the bill in a his testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “The law eliminated same-day registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year olds, out-of-precinct ballots, the first week of early voting, and instituted one of the nation’s most stringent voter ID requirements.”
But through the consistent resistance of legal battles, and the Forward Together Movement’s “Moral Mondays” weekly protests outside the statehouse, “where over 1,200 people were eventually arrested for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience…the ‘monster voter suppression law’ was eventually struck down as intentionally racially discriminatory. In July 2016, a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the law ‘target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision’ and ‘impose[d] cures for problems that did not exist’,” Rev. Dr. Barber recounts.
And though Faya Rose Touré, as well as many voters in Alabama, faced various different efforts to dissuade them from voting, she faced these efforts and fought them head-on with the “Vote or Die” campaign.
“We tried to go into communities and raise the issues that people could relate to,” she says as she explains the name and mission of the campaign. “Like vote, or die — ‘If you don’t vote, this is what will die. The whole campaign to raise the minimum wage will die. Obamacare will die. Consequently, thousands of people, 43,000 people could die.’ So, we tried to frame the issues so they were very real to people, and they could see that this campaign would have an immediate impact on their life.”
As Touré explains, elections impact people, and are impacted by people. “A lot of people think their vote doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t count. And what voter suppression does is, it deepens that attitude. [But] If one person went to Congress, and vetoed the Trump agenda, one vote could make a difference.”
Repairers of the Breach is a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization that works with diverse religious leaders from every U.S. State and the District of Columbia to develop a prophetic social justice vision rooted in moral analysis, moral articulation, and moral action. We publish regular dispatch blogs that examine the impacts of policy violence on the states and people across the country. To receive dispatch blogs by email you can signup or update your subscription preferences by clicking here. To learn more about Repairers of the Breach and the #MoralMovement, or to donate click here.
