27 minute read
Class, Race, Gender, Religion, and the Struggle over the Franchise in the United States
(Martha’s Vineyard Men’s Group, July 13, 2016)
I am descended from russIan jewIsh foreBears whose men were conscripted into Czar Nicholas II’s army and fought in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05. After surviving the war and the Odessa Pogrom of 1905, they emigrated to the United States. They were not especially religious, but one occasion they held sacred was election day. As a child I watched as they never missed an opportunity to cast their ballots. They let me know that the right to vote was a main ingredient of the freedom this nation offered.
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And so in this election year, I thought it would be useful to review the long and checkered evolution of the right to vote in this land, especially because it has been so central to our history and also because it continues to be a matter that has not been fully resolved and may cause significant difficulty and conflict in forthcoming elections.
Beginning in colonial America, just as was the case in the mother country, only males with a defined amount of property, or
freeholders, were entitled to vote. Such a condition in British law dated back to at least 1430. William Blackstone, the great English jurist of the eighteenth century, declared that it was proper “to exclude [from voting] such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own.” He argued that poor people would be tempted to sell their votes, so that “this would give a . . . wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.” (In other words, deprive the poor of the vote, so they won’t be tempted to sell it!) In the colonies, enslaved Blacks, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, indebted artisans, and the propertyless generally were denied the ballot. Also, before the American Revolution, there was no colony in which full political rights were extended to either Jews or Catholics.
When a young George Washington ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses in the mid-1750s, his campaign manager handed out at least a half gallon of rum to each propertied voter. The technique was called “swilling the planters with bumbo!” Corruption was rampant, and voting participation was low across the colonies. Rotten boroughs flourished, as in the old country.
The American Revolution was instrumental in broadening the franchise, but not solely because of any ideological shift, despite the high-minded language regarding equality and “the consent of the governed” in the Declaration of Independence. More significantly, it was the mobilization of a “well-regulated militia” of all males from ages sixteen to sixty, who were required to serve in the Continental army regardless of their assets, which helped turn the tide. When, for example, George Washington arrived in Cambridge in 1775 to take command of the scruffy continental forces, he was shocked to learn that the New England recruits elected their own officers. Those who fought for independence were incensed that they were not able to vote for legislators. Thus the constitutions of many states, such as Georgia, North Carolina, and Vermont, did not impose a property requirement for voting.
Indeed, the relationship between bearing arms and voting has a long and influential history in this land. For example, the TwentySixth Amendment, adopted in 1971, dropping the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, is thought to have been in response to eighteen-year-olds fighting in the war in Vietnam. And the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, granting full citizenship to Native Americans, was enacted partially in recognition of the thousands of Native Americans who fought in World War I.
Philadelphia, as a central venue for the American Revolution, was also a critical location for advancing the franchise. Here the contenders on the side of broadening the franchise included as their leader Benjamin Franklin. He opposed property requirements for voting in the radical 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution and declared that he was against any system that gave “the rich a predominancy in government.”
On the other end of the political spectrum was John Adams of Massachusetts. When challenged to eliminate property and other requirements in a new Bay State constitution, he responded that by doing so
there will be no End of it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell.
Of course, you will recall that Abigail Adams had written to John earlier, asking that in the course of building the new nation, he
not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. . . . If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will
not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
John Adams responded that Abigail’s letter was “the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.”
It should be noted that during this period, the constitutions of Delaware (1776), Maryland (1776), Massachusetts (1780), New Hampshire (1784), New York (1777), and Pennsylvania (1776) protected the rights of free Black males to vote. However, enslaved Blacks and women could not vote in any state.
The struggle over voting rights continued without resolution at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787. Many delegates sought the imposition of property requirements for voting, but they were not adopted. Instead, voting eligibility was generally left to the states, subject to congressional oversight.
However, the Constitution did, and does, provide that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”117 This did not mean that many states did not continue to limit the political rights of Jews or Catholics after the Constitution was ratified. They did.
Franklin, still the champion of the common man, who himself as a youth had escaped from his apprentice printer indentures to his brother in Boston, spoke at the Constitutional Convention on August 10, 1787 (as recorded in James Madison’s notes):
Doctr [sic] Franklin expressed his dislike of every thing that tended to debase the spirit of the common people. If honesty was often the companion of wealth, and if poverty was exposed to peculiar temptation, it was not less true that the
117. Article VI.
possession of property increased the desire of more property. Some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with, were the richest rogues.
Madison added that Franklin worried that if the Constitution “should betray a great partiality to the rich,” it would serve to discourage “the common people from removing to this Country”— that is, discourage immigration that the new nation badly needed.
There were almost 4 million people living in the United States in 1790. By the third national census in 1810, there were 7.2 million, of whom 1.2 million were enslaved Blacks, and there were almost 200,000 free Blacks. And by 1820, there were almost 10 million people. By 1850 there were 23 million, as the population swelled and moved west. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, written after his 1831 visit to the United States, “All classes mingle incessantly, and there is not the least indication of their social position. Everyone shakes hands!”
This was the period of the “Age of Jackson,” when the struggle for the franchise for propertyless males was significantly advanced against the rearguard efforts of slaveholding elites such as John Calhoun (of recent Yale interest) and John Randolph of Virginia. On the other hand, there were those who sought to extend the franchise to all white men, regardless of their assets, as a means of achieving racial solidarity and broad white support for slavery.
Even in New York State in 1821, a battle was waged at a constitutional convention at which jurist Chancellor James Kent declared that “the tendency of universal suffrage, is to jeopardize the rights of property and the principles of liberty.” He warned of governments of retail clerks, factory workers, and “the motley and undefinable population of crowded ports” so that “the indolent and profligate” would thrust “the whole burdens of society upon the industrious and the virtuous.”
The campaigns and elections of Andrew Jackson between 1824 and 1832 brought many new voters, including farmers, laborers,
and small-business people, into the political process. They united around opposition to the banks and “special privilege.” Jackson made naked populist appeals, decrying the rich that “too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” And he warned of laws that “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.”
Elections became more raucous and contentious during this period. On occasion, voting issues made their way to the courts. But early on, the Supreme Court shrank from getting involved. Voting issues were political rather than legal questions, which the courts would, for the most part, avoid for a century.
It should also be mentioned that before the Civil War, there was no clear definition of American citizenship. Indeed, at some point or other, twenty-two states and territories allowed noncitizens to vote. And there was no quota for immigrants. Today it is a crime for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election.
Even more significantly, the exclusion of women from the franchise would become a major political preoccupation over the next seventy years. Women’s suffrage was considered at the small but famed Seneca Falls, New York, convention of July 19–20, 1848, but voting was not the highest item on the agenda. At that time women were prohibited from inheriting property, signing contracts, and serving on juries, and they were the victims of many other legal disabilities as well as being disenfranchised. The convention was called on one week’s notice by feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and area Quakers such as Lucretia Mott. The convention’s title was “Woman’s Rights Convention: A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of Woman.” In preparing the convention’s list of many grievances and proposed resolutions, Stanton added the deprivation by men of women’s right “to the elective franchise.” When Stanton’s husband saw this addition, he warned his wife that “you will turn the proceedings into a farce,” and he left Seneca Falls, so as to disassociate himself from the effort.
On the second day of the convention, the resolutions were individually read and voted upon. The only resolution that was challenged was the one written by Stanton which read, “Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” Many of those present opposed the resolution, with Lucretia Mott saying to Stanton, “Why Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous.” This may suggest how unreachable achieving women’s suffrage was viewed at the time.
Frederick Douglass, the only African American at the meeting (there were a number of other sympathetic men present), rose in support of the resolution. He declared that “in this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.” In the end, the resolution passed, receiving a large majority. That it took more than seventy years from Seneca Falls finally to achieve full voting rights for all women in 1920, in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, is difficult to understand in retrospect.
Unsurprisingly, it was Douglass who unfurled the flag of voting rights for Blacks toward the end of the Civil War. He had been a fervent recruiter of Blacks into the U.S. Army. Over 180,000 Black men, or one in ten of the Union army, had fought in the war. General William Tecumseh Sherman, hardly an idealist, had declared that “when the fight is over, the hand that drops the musket cannot be denied the ballot.”
On April 4, 1865, the day Richmond fell to the Union army, Frederick Douglass told a cheering Faneuil Hall audience in Boston that he supported the “‘immediate, unconditional, and universal’ enfranchisement of the black man in every State in the Union.” Two days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, President Lincoln, speaking from a White House window, endorsed voting rights for Blacks for the first time. In the audience was John
Wilkes Booth, who growled, “That is the last speech he will ever make!” Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre three days later. Clearly, Lincoln’s assassination represented a serious setback for the cause of Black voting rights, succeeded as he was by his Democratic vice president, the racist Andrew Johnson.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, enacted between 1865 and 1870, as well as Reconstruction and its aftermath have been the subject of many histories and cannot be covered here except for a few brief observations. First, the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting against discrimination in voting on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, fractured the relationship between the abolitionists and the women’s suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed it on the ground that women were equally entitled to the franchise and should not be left out. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass, long an advocate of women’s suffrage, supported the amendment, arguing that no one “can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to women as to the negro.” With us, he declared, “it is a question of life and death, at least, in fifteen States of the Union.” The radical abolitionist Republican senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, abstained from supporting the amendment, because it did not ban literacy tests or poll taxes, surely a prescient observation. The amendment was narrowly ratified by the states by 1870.
Both before and after ratification, there was a brief period in which Blacks voted in large numbers in the South, often under the protection of federal troops, and Blacks were elected to the House and Senate. But the contested Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 resulted in a deal in which the Republicans would keep the White House and federal troops would be withdrawn from the South, thereby ending Reconstruction and the right of southern Blacks to vote. There followed ninety years of vicious murders, lynchings, terror, and intimidation by the Klan and other groups to prevent
Blacks from voting and enjoying full rights of citizenship. And poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and impossible-to-answer literacy tests were employed as well to the same end. For example, in Louisiana there were 130,000 Black voters registered in 1896, but this number plummeted to 1,300 by 1904. It should be mentioned that poll taxes also served to disenfranchise poor whites. Thus there were both class and racial aspects to the post-Reconstruction deprivations of the franchise.
It was not until the post–World War II period that the issue of voting rights for Blacks was again pushed front and center, and indeed, the issue caused the walkout of southern delegates to the 1948 Democratic Convention over platform provisions, leading to the Dixiecrat Party’s presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond. That was the election in which Harry Truman, in an unexpected victory, narrowly defeated Thomas Dewey of New York. Strom Thurmond carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. He became a Republican in 1964 and supported Barry Goldwater against Lyndon Johnson for president.
The cause of Black enfranchisement did not receive significant consideration during the remainder of the Truman presidency— or during the Eisenhower years, when the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, desegregating public schools, became the center of national attention and conflict.
As for women’s suffrage, it made little progress in the remainder of the nineteenth century, although it had a significant revival in the early twentieth. In the 1916 election, both the Democrats and the Republicans adopted women’s suffrage planks, although the Democrats took the position that it was a matter to be decided individually by the states. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, women had obtained the vote in eleven of the then forty-eight states, mostly in the West. The patriotism that the war had evoked lent itself to the argument that the United States could not seek to “make the world safe for democracy,” a Wilsonian
slogan employed in support of our entering World War I, if we denied women a voice in government at home. The combination of lobbying Congress, and sit-ins, marches, and hunger strikes by militant women’s groups both before and during the war succeeded in having the Nineteenth Amendment easily pass the House in January 1918, and it narrowly passed the Senate in June 1919. By August 1920, it had been ratified by three-fourths of the states, and women across the country voted in a presidential election for the first time in November 1920, in which Ohio Senator Warren Harding soundly defeated Ohio Governor James Cox.
The first woman elected to the House was Jeannette Rankin of Montana. She served from 1917 to 1919, but she was thereafter gerrymandered out of her seat. She was elected to the House again in 1940. Rankin is mostly remembered as a pacifist who voted in Congress against entering both world wars. But she wanted to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted in Congress in favor of women’s suffrage. The first female elected as a senator was Hattie Caraway of Arkansas in 1932. Today there are 20 female senators out of 100, and 84 female House members out of 435, or about 1 in 5 overall.
How to assess the fierce male opposition to women’s suffrage during most of American history? Simply put, it can be explained only by the belief that in the natural order of things, women were a lower form of human (“the weaker sex”), which was ordained to work in the service of men, under their direction, guidance, and control, and were confined to childbearing, child-rearing, and the home, leaving dominion over business, finance, government, and public affairs to men as women’s supposed betters in intellect, wisdom, and judgment. Even as enlightened and progressive an American as Louis Brandeis opposed women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth century, although he was thereafter converted by his feminist wife and daughters in the twentieth.
It was not until the broad renewal of the general civil rights
struggle, beginning with the southern sit-ins in 1960, the freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington, the battles over voting rights in Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere, and the confrontations and beatings of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and related murders, that the voting rights issue came to front and center of national attention again. On the strength of President Johnson’s 61.1 percent popular vote over Barry Goldwater in 1964, his thirty years of experience on Capitol Hill, and his status as a son of the South, he was uniquely positioned to take on southern racist intransigence over voting rights for Blacks. And he did take it on. As he told his attorney general, Nick Katzenbach,118 “I want you to write me the Goddamdest, toughest, voting rights act that you can devise.” On March 15, 1965, Johnson delivered one of the greatest presidential speeches in history to a joint session of Congress, introducing his voting rights bill, declaring in no uncertain terms that “we shall overcome.” You can, of course, hear and read his speech online.
However, less than fifty years later, in a 5–4 Supreme Court decision rendered on June 25, 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court struck down as unconstitutional Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required preapproval by the federal government of changes in the voting laws of certain states. The majority reasoned that circumstances had changed significantly for the better, so that the bases for enacting the law no longer existed, thereby rendering it unconstitutional as an interference with rights reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment. In a blistering dissent joined by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer, Justice Ginsburg declared in part that
the Court strikes §4(b)’s coverage provision because, in its view, the provision is not based on “current conditions.” . . . It discounts, however, that one such condition was the preclearance
118. A U of C Law School teacher of mine.
remedy in place in the covered jurisdictions, a remedy Congress designed both to catch discrimination before it causes harm, and to guard against return to old ways. . . . Volumes of evidence supported Congress’ determination that the prospect of retrogression was real. Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.
Justice Ginsburg demonstrated that many hundreds of proposed voting changes had been rejected by the Justice Department over the preceding fifty years through the preclearance process. Indeed, such changes are now being implemented without preapproval being required. This will necessitate many years of “after the fact” litigation seeking to set these changes aside.
The Shelby County decision, removing the federal government’s authority to oversee and preapprove changes in the voting laws of nine states and a number of counties, cities, and towns in six partially covered states was not the only defeat for protecting the right to vote. Even earlier, other states began enacting laws that would serve to limit the franchise in the name of upholding and promoting honest elections and avoiding fraud.
A major case of this kind that reached the Supreme Court in 2008 involved an Indiana law that requires voters in primary or general elections to present at the polls a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or passport: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008). Prior to the law, Indiana voters (other than new voters) simply were required to sign a poll book that could be compared with their signature on file. Some voters, candidates, and the Indiana Democratic Party filed suit, challenging the law on due process and equal protection grounds. A federal district court in Indiana upheld the law in 2006, and an appeal was taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit. It affirmed the district court’s decision by a 2–1 panel vote. The majority opinion was delivered by Judge Richard Posner, one of the nation’s most distinguished jurists, who, in addition to having served on the Seventh Circuit since 1981, has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School since 1969. In his spare time Judge Posner has written forty books on law-related subjects. It is interesting to quote from Judge Posner’s majority opinion in the Indiana case:
No doubt most people who don’t have photo ID are low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates. Exit polls in recent midterm elections show a strong negative correlation between income and voting Democratic, with the percentage voting Democratic rising from 45 percent for voters with an income of at least $200,000 to 67 percent for voters having an income below $15,000.119 Thus the new law injures the Democratic Party by compelling the party to devote resources to getting to the polls those of its supporters who would otherwise be discouraged by the new law from bothering to vote.
Nevertheless, Judge Posner, in his majority opinion, concluded that the Indiana voter ID law be upheld, ultimately because the purpose of avoiding fraud at the polls outweighed the possible disenfranchisement of voters. Circuit Judge Terence Evans dissented. Here’s a straightforward bit of what he had to say:
Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-
119. Donathan L. Brown and Michael Clemons, Voting Rights under Fire: The Continuing Struggle for People of Color (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger ABC-CLIO, 2015), 81. See also Jeffrey M. Stonecash, Class and Party in American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2018), 114 (table 5.7).
day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic. We should subject this law to strict scrutiny . . . and strike it down as an undue burden on the fundamental right to vote.
The percentage of eligible voters participating in elections has, for many years, been on a downward trajectory. With that being the case, one would think states should be looking for creative ways (like allowing people to vote at places they frequent and are familiar with, like shopping malls rather than basements of fire stations) to increase voter participation. Yet, the Indiana law we sanction today does just the opposite. Constricting the franchise in a democratic society, when efforts should be instead undertaken to expand it, is not the way to go.
As you can see, neither of these appellate judges “beat around the bush.”
The Seventh Circuit’s decision was affirmed by the Supreme Court one year later, in 2008. There was a plurality opinion written by Justice Stevens, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, with Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas joining in the result. A dissenting opinion was filed by Justice Souter, in which Justices Ginsburg and Breyer joined. From the time the Indiana law was upheld, an additional eleven states have enacted similar voter photo ID laws, which will be in place for the elections this November. Many other states had adopted such provisions earlier.
An incredible aspect of the Indiana decision is that both Judge Posner and Justice Stevens later publicly questioned the correctness of their own opinions in the case, which is most unusual. As for Posner, he told the Huffington Post in October 2013 that he had been wrong and that dissenting Judge Evans had gotten it right. He added that “we weren’t given the information that would enable [the proper] balance to be struck” between preventing fraud and
protecting voters’ rights.120 As for Justice Stevens (now retired), he recently declared that his was a fairly unfortunate decision but that he felt himself bound by the facts that were in the trial record and that he thought he was precluded from relying upon other available sources of information. He said that in his view, Justice Souter had gone beyond the record in support of his dissent.
Of course, this raises the issue presented by the use of the socalled Brandeis brief, first employed by Louis Brandeis in arguing Muller v. Oregon in 1908, in which he presented sociological data in his brief to the Supreme Court to support the need to protect women workers on the job. And of course, a Brandeis brief was more famously relied upon in Brown v. Board of Education to prove that “separate but equal” public schools were inherently unequal. Better evidence demonstrating the inhibiting aspects of photo ID requirements in voting, as against the potentiality of voter fraud in their absence, might have had a significant impact upon the result in the Indiana decision and its aftermath.
Judge Posner had a later opportunity to make amends for his earlier opinion in the Indiana case. It was in connection with a 2014 Seventh Circuit case challenging the Wisconsin voter photo ID law. Posner was not on the panel that upheld the law, but he filed an opinion in connection with his request that the entire Seventh Circuit review the panel’s decision. The full court declined to do so by a 5–5 vote. In his opinion Posner said that “there is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.” More specifically, Posner observed that photo ID laws are “highly correlated with a state’s having a Republican governor and Republican control of the legislature and appear to be aimed at limiting voting
120. See The New York Times, October 16, 2013, A16 (New York edition).
by minorities, particularly blacks.” In Wisconsin, according to evidence presented at the trial, the voter ID law will disenfranchise 300,000 residents, or 9 percent of registered voters.
Much has been written in the press recently about the voter photo ID laws. A headline in the Washington Post of May 23 of this year declared that “getting a photo ID so you can vote is easy. Unless you’re poor, black, Latino or elderly.” For example, a federal court in Texas recently found that 608,470 registered voters there do not have the forms of identification that the state now requires for voting. And it has been estimated that 11 percent of voting-age Americans do not have government-issued photo IDs. Recently, former Attorney General Eric Holder compared the costs and difficulties associated with obtaining birth certificates, citizenship papers, and other documents required to obtain voting rights or IDs as a new form of poll tax or other taxes that were outlawed by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964. Many of the new laws presently are in litigation but can be expected to be enforced in the November 2016 elections.
Clearly, efforts to limit access to the polls continue to be a presence in our political system. But there have been some positive countertrends as well. The principal tool designed to expand voter access has been the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. It had been vetoed by President Bush in 1992 but was signed into law by President Clinton in 1993. The linchpin of this law is its “Motor Voter” component, under which states are obligated to integrate voter registration with applying for a driver’s license. However, in the twenty-three years that this law has been in effect, many states have simply not been complying. Similarly, although the law requires that state agencies offering or renewing public-assistance benefits provide voter registration assistance, here, too, noncompliance has been substantial. Efforts to improve compliance in these areas have also required litigation, but progress has been slow.
My recitation of the history of the expansion (and occasional
retraction) of the right to vote in our country is a useful recapitulation of what it has taken to advance the franchise for all of our citizens in the last two-hundred-plus years of our country’s history. Hopefully, the future will see the expansion of these rights of franchise so that all citizens will be able to exercise their voting rights more fully and freely, and without artificial impediments, so that they may participate in determining our nation’s future and destiny.
Postscript
Four years of Donald Trump’s barbaric presidency; his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, which produced the largest number of votes cast in history; his false claim that the election had been stolen, which the pollsters tell us that at least two-thirds of Republicans believe; the election of two Democrats, a Black minister and a Jewish politician to the Senate from the state of Georgia, which resulted in the Democrats achieving narrow control of the Senate—all this set off alarm bells for the Republican Party in 2021 over the growing electoral participation and influence of minority voters across the country.
As I write in August 2021, there are at least 361 new Republicansponsored voter restriction bills filed and pending in forty-seven states. On May 30, 2021, the Republican-controlled Texas State Senate passed far-reaching election laws that would ban drivethrough voting; twenty-four-hour voting; using tents, garages, and temporary structures for voting; and would prohibit election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters and otherwise limit absentee voting. New restrictive voting provisions already have been enacted in Georgia and Florida. President Biden has called these laws “an assault on democracy,” designed to disproportionately deprive Black and Brown Americans of the franchise. He declared that “in the 21st century we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.” According to a report by
the Brennan Center for Justice, as of May 4, 2020, fourteen states already had passed twenty-two new laws that make access to voting more difficult.
With the 2022 midterm elections in sight and with three new conservative Trump appointees on the Supreme Court, giving the Republican appointees a 6–3 edge, the nation’s ability to ensure that all citizens’ right to be heard at the polls is protected, and that they not be disenfranchised, has been seriously undermined.
