Voting suppression campaigns on steroids ahead of 2020
25th November 2019 · 0 Comments
Black Americans have been fighting for the right to vote and access to the ballot box began in earnest in the late 1860s, after the Civil War. We have marched, died, and fought in the courts for the right to vote in the U.S. And, if the last decade is any indicator, we are still fighting to keep our vote, as white politicians pull every trick in the book to keep us from voting in the 2020 elections.
The 26th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, ratified on July 1, 1971, guarantees that: “The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
The fact that we are guaranteed the right to vote hasn’t stopped white elected officials from using the law to codify voter suppression, so that in this rapidly diversifying United States, they can continue to dominate the levers of power and control the taxpayers’ loot in the country. A review of the National Voting Rights Act of 1993, the so-called ‘Voter Motor Law’ appeared patriotic and just in its goal of increasing voter participation.
But like all legislation crafted and put forth by white legislators regarding voting rights, the NVRA of 1993 then-President William Clinton signed into law, contained an insidious portion that is clearly designed to allow states to engage in voter suppression campaigns. The law lays out rules around the process for maintaining accurate voter registration data. Sounds innocuous, huh? But those very rules give states carte blanc to purge voters from its rolls if a voter has not voted in two consecutive federal elections.
This discriminatory law flies in the face of what is mandated in the Constitution of the United States of America, as so many laws that disenfranchise people of color do.
The purging of Black voters rose to a level of unbridled discrimination after the law was passed. Most recently, a Brennan Center of Justice study found that at least 17 million voters were purged nationwide between 2016-2018.
In 2017, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp canceled more than 668,000 voter registrations in 2017 and has purged 1.4 million from the roles since 2010. In 2018, Kemp ran against Stacey Abrams, an attorney, former elected official, and author, in a gubernatorial race that Abrams lost by 55,000 votes.
After her loss, Abrams organization, Fair Fight Action (FFA), filed a lawsuit against the state. The lawsuit is seeking a court decision that will stop voter registration purges, absentee ballot cancellations, precinct closures and potential voting machine tampering. The FFA lawsuit alleges racial minorities were especially disenfranchised.
Abrams, who attended last week’s Democratic Presidential Debate, appeared on MSNBC and spoke about voter suppression and her organization’s Fair Fight 2020 campaign to turn out the vote and to fight against voter suppression. The day after the debate, presidential candidates Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, too to the phones and helped the FFA to contact 330,000 Georgia voters who are in danger of being purged from the voting rolls.
Abrams says the Fair Fight 2020 campaign is designed to mitigate the harm being done by officials engaged in voter suppression activities in Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, and Michigan, and in 20 states across the nation, including battleground states. “77,000 votes changed the election,” Abrams said of Trump’s electoral college win.
Abrams criticized Republicans for using the ‘lose it or use it’ loophole in the NVRA.
She made an indisputable legal case for striking out the discriminatory practices in the NVRA, which allows states to purge people from the rolls because they are suspected of having died, moved without alerting the state, not answering confirmation letters to validate the voter’s current address, or not voting in the past two federal elections.
“It’s (the right to vote) is the only right you lose because you don’t use it.” Abram went on to draw a parallel between other constitutional rights and voting rights laws being used to get around U.S. constitutional voting rights.
“You don’t lose your Second Amendment right, if you don’t go hunting,” or if you don’t purchase a gun. You don’t lose your freedom of religion, if you don’t go to church regularly, and we don’t lose our First Amendment right to freedom of expression, if we don’t speak out or attend protest marches.
Point well taken, Attorney Abrams.
According to an August 2018 article in The Louisiana Weekly, “Louisiana’s last voter purge was in 2017, a routine post-election clean up that resulted in 55,000 names removed from an inactive voter list of more than 100,000. (There are some three million registered voters in total in the state).”
It goes without saying that our vote is the only weapon we have in the fight against discrimination, racism, and injustices of all forms. If you’re not registered to vote, stop what you’re doing and get registered. Louisianans can check the Louisiana Secretary of State website’s inactive voter list to see if they’ve been purged from the state’s voting rolls.
This article originally published in the November 25, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
