As the Republicans prepare to hold the first presidential debate of the 2016 race, the media are focusing largely on which candidates will be heard. On Tuesday, Fox News announced Republican Governors Chris Christie and John Kasich had grabbed the last spots in Thursday’s 10-candidate debate. Fox News said it calculated its top 10 list by averaging five national polls, a process which came under fire from polling agencies earlier this week.
Well, today, we look at who will be able to vote in the upcoming election. This week marks the 50th anniversary of a landmark achievement of the civil rights movement. It was on August 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, as Reverend Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and now 14-term Congressman John Lewis looked on.
President Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965 signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The law has been under constant attack ever since. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court struck down parts of the measure in a case called Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder when it ruled that states with histories of voting-related racial discrimination no longer had to “pre-clear” changes to their voting laws with the federal government. One month later, North Carolina passed sweeping voting restrictions that cut early voting and eliminated same-day registration. During the midterm elections in 2014, these new rules prevented thousands from casting their vote.
Voting rights could become a pivotal issue in the 2016 race. On Tuesday, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination, called for a constitutional amendment to protect every American’s right to vote. Meanwhile, California announced Tuesday it’s dropping its challenge to a court ruling allowing thousands of newly released felons to vote. The move effectively extends voting rights to 60,000 to 73,000 former prisoners.
Ari Berman talking:
it was an amazing moment to see John Lewis, who nearly died in Selma 50 years earlier, introducing Barack Obama, hugging him on stage, and basically Lewis saying, “I never thought I would see this day,” and the president saying, “I never thought I would see this day, either.” It was very emotional to be there. And I was glad that I was there, because I really wanted to get that moment into my book. And I snuck it in. It was basically the last thing I was able to add.
And, you know, then history comes full circle, of course, because they’re in Selma celebrating the Voting Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act has also been gutted. So the same thing they fought for, 50 years later, was now under siege. And that gave some real tension to the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. It wasn’t just a commemoration; it was really a call to recognize the importance of the Voting Rights Act and to restore it going forward.
the second Emancipation and the second Reconstruction is what’s so important to remember, because in 1870 we passed the 15th Amendment, that said the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Then we essentially ignored the 15th Amendment for almost 95 years. Reconstruction, when there was a flourishing of black political power in the South, lasted for basically a decade after federal troops pulled out of the South as a result of the disputed 1876 election. States like Mississippi and Alabama started passing things like poll taxes, literacy tests to disenfranchise black voters. And so, what you saw is, after the Civil War, an explosion of black political power, basically followed by the total absence of black political power just a decade later. And so, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 essentially was passed just to enforce the 15th Amendment, which we shouldn’t have needed to enforce in the first place, because it was already on the books. And so, what the Congress and what President Johnson did with the Voting Rights Act was make sure that we didn’t have to have a third Reconstruction, a third Emancipation, that we would solve this problem of voting discrimination once and for all.
we’re in a, I think, very disturbing and ironic position, where we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, and there’s been a much broader attack on voting rights. So, from 2011 to 2015, 468 new voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states. So this is a battle that’s taking place all across the country to try to make it harder to vote. Half the states in the country have passed new laws making it harder to vote since 2010. So that was the backdrop to the Supreme Court’s decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and allowed those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, places like Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, to no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. So, people—voters are being hit from all sides here. They’re being hit by new voting restrictions making it harder for young people, minorities, women to be able to vote, and they’re also being hit by a Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act, ironically, at the very moment when the Voting Rights Act was needed so much, after all these new voting restrictions had been passed.
in Florida, they had a felon voter purge. Basically, what happened is the state sent a huge list of people that they said were felons who were on the voting rolls, and told the county supervisors in Florida to purge them in advance of the 2000 election. It turned out that that list was littered with errors, and it was disproportionately African-American. African Americans were 11 percent of Florida’s electorate but 44 percent of those who were wrongly labeled felons. And so what happened was, thousands of people showed up on Election Day, were told that they were felons—wrongly—and weren’t able to vote. After the election, the state ran the numbers again and found that 12,000 people were wrongly labeled as felons and potentially purged from the rolls. That was 500—that was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory. So, this purge could have very well decided the Florida election.
And it was significant for a few different reasons. Number one, it led to a new wave of disenfranchisement efforts. Republicans realized after Florida that small manipulations in the electoral process, like this voter purge, could swing close elections. The second thing it did is the Bush administration empowered a new generation of counterrevolutionaries who sought to gut the Voting Rights Act, to hype the threat of voter fraud, to restrict voting rights more broadly. That laid the groundwork for the assault on voting rights in the Obama era. And it also led to two justices being put on the court, John Roberts and Sam Alito—Roberts who, I might add, went to Florida during the 2000 recount to help the Bush team, on the invite of Ted Cruz, who was running Bush’s legal team at the time. So, a lot of people who are present today—Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, John Roberts—were active in Florida 2000. But the Bush administration led to this Supreme Court, this remaking of the Supreme Court, that then gutted the Voting Rights Act. So I think Florida was a pivotal turning point in the weakening and assault on voting rights.
In a 2001 report by the Civil Rights Commission on the 2000 election debacle in Florida, it accused then-Governor Jeb Bush and his secretary of state, Katherine Harris, of “gross dereliction” of duty, saying they chose to ignore mounting evidence of problems. It read, quote, “despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement and not the dead-heat contest that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. … After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act occurred in Florida.” Now, this, you know, obviously led to who would be president of the United States, President George W. Bush, but right now Jeb Bush is running for president, the former governor of Florida, who this commission is criticizing.
I think that Jeb Bush has a lot of questions to answer about his role during the 2000 election in Florida. By all accounts, he was a very hands-on governor. He was involved in every aspect of the state. But when he was asked, “What role did you play in supervising Florida’s elections?” he said, “I didn’t play any role. It was all Katherine Harris’s fault,” which is totally at odds with his profile as governor. And the problems on this voter purge list emerged well before the election. In May 2000, elections supervisors themselves found themselves wrongly labeled as felons. So it was clear that this purge list was gravely flawed, and elections supervisors went to the state and said, “You have to disregard this.” And the state refused to. So, Jeb Bush should have known well in advance of the election that this was going to be a problem, that it could lead to chaos. Instead, he did nothing. And afterwards, he took no responsibility.
And it’s unfortunate that we then had a new administration, the Bush administration, which instead of investigating these violations under the Voting Rights Act, instead sought to gut the Voting Rights Act and politicize the Justice Department and hype the nonexistent problem of voter fraud, instead of the very real problem of voter disenfranchisement that we saw in the 2000 election in Florida, that we saw in Ohio in 2004, and moving forward.
in the ’80s and ’90s, was an incredible underrepresentation of African-American and Latino candidates in Congress and at the state level. Before John Lewis was elected to Congress in 1987, for example, there were only two African Americans elected from the South in Congress, which is absolutely shocking. They were 25 percent of the population in the South and only two black members of Congress. So there was a big push to create these districts to get more representation, so that’s why people wanted them to be drawn. At the same time, there were a lot of Democrats, black Democrats and white Democrats, who were wary of the point you just made, of drawing these districts, because they knew that Republicans, if black voters or Hispanic voters were packed in certain districts, would win these other seats. What happened was that there was this flourishing of minority political power, and there was also a flourishing of Republican political power, as well.
And what happened as a result of the 2010 redistricting cycle, when Republicans had even larger majorities in these states, is they further packed these districts. So they took a district that was already 60 percent African-American, and they made it 65 percent African-American to further weaken minority voting strength. And there’s now been a backlash against this. And what you’re seeing in the South is black candidates are actually saying, “We don’t want to have these packed districts anymore. We’re OK with a 45 percent district, a 50 percent district. We don’t need a 70 percent black district anymore.” So I think, in some ways, it was a response to underrepresentation, but I also think that Republicans, in many ways, have turned the Voting Rights Act on its head.
there’s just been a relentless attack on voting rights in Ohio. We saw seven-hour lines in 2004, because there wasn’t enough polling machines at predominantly Democratic and predominantly minority voting locations. We saw thousands of voters turned away in that election. Ohio then expanded early voting and gave more voting opportunities in 2008 to voters. It worked very well. So then, after that, Republicans cut early voting both in 2012 and in 2014 in Ohio. Some of this was done under John Kasich’s watch.
Not just John Kasich, but remember, Rick Perry, who is not in this debate but is very prominent, has been a strong supporter of voter ID laws. Ted Cruz, who is in the debate, very strong supporter of voter ID laws. Marco Rubio, strong proponent of Florida cutting early voting and doing other things like that, shutting down voter registration drives. Chris Christie has opposed early voting and automatic voter registration in New Jersey. So virtually all of these candidates in the Republican debate have been on the wrong side of the voting rights issue. None of them, to my mind, are supporting restoring the Voting Rights Act. Only—Rand Paul is the only one who has talked about the need, for example, for felons—nonviolent felons to get their voting rights back. He’s the only one who’s said some stuff that’s positive on the voting rights front. But these candidates have been united in opposing strong protections for the Voting Rights Act. And ironically, their debate is going to be on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. I hope Fox—I’m not holding my breath, but I would hope Fox would ask them about this.
there’s been two trials over Texas’s voter ID law, so there’s a long record in this case of facts. We know that 5 percent of Texas’s electorate doesn’t have a government-issued ID. We know that they have to pay for the underlying documents to get this ID, like a birth certificate, which is why it’s been called a poll tax. We know that people have difficulty obtaining an ID because a third of counties in Texas don’t even have a DMV office. So, if you live in rural Texas, you don’t have a driver’s license, you don’t have a DMV office, how are you supposed to get to an adjoining county with no public transportation in a state like Texas? We also know that thousands of voters are now being turned away in Texas as a result of this law. We saw story after story after story in the 2014 election of people who had been voting all their lives, who couldn’t vote for this ID law, based on no record of voter fraud. The state presented no evidence of voter impersonation in court to justify its law. And so, I think, on the surface of it, things that Perry says makes a lot of sense. Doesn’t everyone have an ID? But the record in Texas shows that not everyone has an ID, that it is very burdensome, that it is turning voters away from the polls.
the 2016 election is going to be—in 15 states, they have new voting restrictions in place for the first presidential cycle. So a lot of states are going to have this battle for the first time in a presidential year. These are crucial swing states, like North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin. And without the full protections of the VRA and without—and amongst the backdrop of this broader attack on voting rights, I think voting rights is going to be a big issue in this election.
And the 50th anniversary of the VRA should be an opportunity for people to recognize the importance of this law. And so, I wanted to write the book so people could understand the history of the act, what it did, understand the backlash to the act, as well, and realize this is not just something that’s in the history books, this is a fight that’s ongoing today, including in the 2016 election.
California is one of those big blue states that’s moving, I think, very rapidly to expand voting rights. And I think that’s a good thing that states now, in response to the backlash, are trying to expand voting rights. I do worry we’re headed to a two-tiered election system, where blue states expand voting rights and red states restrict voting rights. I don’t think that’s a very good thing for our democracy.
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Ari Berman, author of the new book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. He covers voting rights for The Nation.
— source democracynow.org