Stacey Abrams Was Robbed

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Stacey Abrams Was Robbed

The white men who run most of the elections in Georgia were never going to let a Black woman become governor. Or, like their colleagues in Florida, any African American. But especially Stacey Abrams, a smart (Yale Law School) young woman of color who had been a highly effective legislator in the Georgia General Assembly.

There’s history here. In 1867, a total of 33 Black men were sent to the Georgia Constitutional Convention (to help write a new, post–Civil War, non-slave-state constitution for the state), where they promptly introduced provisions calling for free public school for Black children, the right of Black men to serve on juries overseeing cases involving white defendants, and doing away with debtors’ prisons in the state. None made it into the constitution.

The following year, 32 Black men were elected to that state’s General Assembly, where they introduced legislation banning racial discrimination on public transportation, protecting Black laborers from abuse, and ensuring “the protection of [Black] citizens’ rights.”

Within a few months, the white men of Georgia’s legislature had unseated their Black colleagues, an event that reverberated all the way to Washington, DC, where unionist Republicans charged that this was proof that Georgia was still not politically reconstructed after the war.

In 1870, the US Congress allowed Georgia back into the Union, in part because Georgia’s General Assembly passed two of the Black members’ bills, providing for nondiscrimination on public carriers and the creation of a public education system. Twenty-six Black men were elected that year and allowed to serve.

But the Black members of the Georgia legislature suffered terrible harassment, both from their colleagues and from members of the newly re-formed Ku Klux Klan, the nation’s preeminent domestic terrorist group, which had begun an aggressive program of lynching, robbery, rape, and terror— particularly around election time—throughout the South. Only nine Black men were elected in 1872, and within a decade the legislature was again entirely white.

Fast-forward to 2013. For three generations, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had constrained Georgia’s white politicians in their efforts to keep the state’s power structures in white hands by preventing Black people from voting. Every time they wanted to close a voting precinct in a Black neighborhood or shorten black polling place hours, they’d had to submit the proposal to the US Justice Department for approval, which almost never was granted.

Every time they wanted to purge large numbers of black people from the voting rolls, they had to look over their shoulders at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and worry.

They couldn’t introduce bizarre anti-voting laws like the “exact match” law that required a voter’s registration card to exactly match his or her main form of ID, allowing polling station workers to disqualify voters—as they saw fit after checking out the color of the voter’s skin—based on a period after their middle initial appearing on their ID but not their registration form, for example.

Republican Senator Brian Kemp of Georgia had introduced an exact match bill in 2008; it was shot down the next year by the DOJ as being discriminatory. But that was before 2013, when, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court eliminated the requirement that laws or rules like exact match had to be precleared by the DOJ before Georgia could put them in place.

Thus, when Kemp became secretary of state and was in charge of all voting in the state of Georgia, and the state no longer had to attend to the Voting Rights Act because of the Shelby County case, he reinstated exact match just in time for the 2018 election and used it to disqualify the registrations of more than 50,000 mostly Black voters.

It was a decision that not only benefited pretty much every Republican in the state running for election or reelection in 2018, but also hugely benefited Kemp, who was Stacey Abrams’s opponent in the gubernatorial race that year.

Race-based voter suppression has a long history in America. But the Republican response to the election of America’s first Black president was probably the most dramatic increase in these efforts in the lifetime of anybody alive today.

During the eight years that Barack Obama was president, seven of the 11 states with the largest Black populations passed aggressive voter suppression laws. Nine of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic populations did the same. And nine of the 15 states that required preclearance under the Voting Rights Act passed, after the Supreme Court gutted that law, draconian voter suppression laws that principally affected people of color, college students, and people old enough to be on Social Security.65

States that had large Black populations—like Georgia—even shut the polls the Sunday before Election Day on Tuesday, because Black churches had been organizing very successful “souls to the polls” voting drives after church services. Georgia State Senator Fran Millar said that he and other Georgia Republicans were “investigating if there is any way to stop this [voting] action [by Black people]” and that they “will try to eliminate this election law loophole [early voting on Sundays] in January.”66

Election loophole? one might ask. As Wendy Weiser, who directs the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, wrote for the American Prospect, “An Ohio official, explaining his 2012 vote to limit early voting hours, said: ‘I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban [read: African American] voter-turnout machine.’”67

Republican-controlled states across America passed hundreds of laws to make it harder for racial minorities, as well as young people and the elderly of all races, to vote, with the most severe passed in 2015 and 2016. The Brennan Center for Justice documented those states in which Republican legislative majorities made such changes just in 2016:

•      In Montana, civil rights groups were banned by law from helping people cast absentee ballots.
•      North Dakota passed a strict voter ID law.
•      South Dakota made it much harder for ex-felons to get back their right to vote.
•      Nebraska cut back days for early voting.
•      Kansas required both proof of citizenship and government-issued photo ID.
•      Alabama passed severe ID restrictions.
•      Iowa restricted voter registration drives, passed a strict ID law, made early and absentee voting harder, and cut the voting rights of ex-felons.
•      Wisconsin passed a strict ID law and limited early voting.
•      Illinois curbed voter registration drives.
•      Missouri passed a voter ID law.
•      Indiana passed a law to institutionalize voter purges and restricted the kinds of ID that can be used.
•      Ohio cut early voting and made it harder to cast an absentee or provisional ballot.
•      West Virginia cut early voting from 17 days to 10 days.
•      Virginia made it harder for groups to register people to vote and passed a draconian voter ID law.
•      North and South Carolina both put voter ID restrictions in place.
•      Georgia passed Brian Kemp’s exact match voter registration law, as well as voter ID.
•      Florida cut early voting, passed laws threatening to imprison people improperly running voter registration drives (causing the League of Women Voters to stop registering people in that state), and made it harder for ex-felons to recover their voting rights.
•      Mississippi passed a voter ID law, as did Tennessee and Arkansas.
•      Texas curbed voter registration drives and passed an ID law.
•      Arizona limited mail-in ballots.
•      Rhode Island passed an ID law, as did New Hampshire, that specifically made it much harder for college students to vote.68
•      In 2019, in response to 2018 Democratic gains in Arizona, Kentucky, and Texas, as of this writing all three states have Republican-sponsored legislation in the pipeline for the 2020 election to make voting or registering voters harder. Techniques include making it a go-to-prison crime for making any mistakes on your voter registration form in Texas; Tennessee is similarly threatening people doing voter registration drives with prison if there are errors on the forms they turn in; and Arizona is making the entire voting process more complex.69

Meanwhile, Republicans were vigorously taking people’s names off the voting rolls through a variety of purge methods. The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”70

In the minority voting precincts that had been overseen by the DOJ back when the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision stopped the feds from looking over the shoulders of state officials in those places with a long history of race-based voter suppression, Republicans totally closed 868 polling places between the 2013 Shelby County decision and the 2016 election.71 The result is that between the 2012 and 2016 elections, Black voting participation fell nearly 7 percent.72

The story told by Republicans was that the drop came about because Hillary Clinton wasn’t as popular as Obama and she wasn’t Black. But even in states and counties where Black people were on the ballot, there was still a large drop in Black voter participation. Although the Hispanic population in America is among the fastest-growing ethnicities, Latino voters fell by .4 percent in 2016.

The only reasonable explanation is that the GOP’s voter suppression efforts were successful.

In Georgia, they worked particularly well. Kemp had used several different voter suppression methods, from voter ID to massive voter purges to closing or time-limiting DMV offices that could issue IDs in Black areas while extending their hours in white neighborhoods. He closed more than 200 polling places, mostly in poor and minority neighborhoods.73

Out of over 3.9 million votes cast in Georgia, Kemp won by a mere 55,000, about the same as the number of people he’d forbidden from voting because there wasn’t an exact match of the middle names or initials or commas on mostly Black voters’ registration forms submitted in the months running up to the election.74

Not to mention over 1.5 million voters he’d removed from the rolls—such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s cousin, 92-year-old Christine Jordan, who was one of thousands turned away at the polls or given a provisional ballot that was never counted.75 Jordan had been voting every two years at the same precinct for a full 50 years until Kemp’s radical administration removed her name from the rolls.

Stacey Abrams ran a great race, and as Hillary Clinton later pointed out, she lost the election only because of voter suppression efforts by Brian Kemp and the GOP.76

Stacey Abrams’s story isn’t just a story about Georgia. It’s the story of a political party that has lost touch with average American voters and has made the deliberate choice to hold power by a variety of forms of election manipulation and, in some cases, outright fraud.

The stakes are high: control of state and federal government. Meanwhile, the risks are low. Several people of color have been sent to prison for voting when they shouldn’t (because they were ex-felons and didn’t know about the law disenfranchising ex-felons), but the white Republicans who put into place and administer these modern-day Jim Crow systems are almost never prosecuted. Worse, they usually are well paid and rapidly climb the political ladder.

It all became necessary because the previous con job that the GOP had been running on the American electorate since the Nixon presidency stopped working toward the end of the Obama presidency. The following chapters examine some of the tactics that Republicans are still using to suppress, dilute, and otherwise steal Americans’ votes.