One Person, No Vote

One Person, No Vote by writer and professor Carol Anderson is a current affairs book and finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. It was originally published in 2018; in 2019, Anderson added an Afterword to the paperback edition and released a young adult version. One Person, No Vote documents how Republican-led state governments exploit a weakened Voting Rights Act to tilt elections in their favor.

Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, many pundits noted the sharp drop in voting by African Americans and other people of color. Anderson states that this is not due to a lack of interest but a wave of voting laws in Republican-controlled state governments that claim to prevent fraud but actually restrict access to demographic groups that lean towards the Democratic Party.

Voter suppression targeting Black citizens and other people of color dates to Reconstruction. The Mississippi Plan of 1890 and similar laws across the South instituted literacy tests and poll taxes to lock out disadvantaged African Americans, and state officials encouraged violence against would-be voters. Black activists turned to the courts to overthrow these laws, and the 1960s civil rights protests in Selma, Alabama led to the Voting Rights Act, which forced regions with a history of discrimination to submit election-related laws for federal preclearance.

Yet this law suffered setbacks from weak oversight by Republican administrations, dog-whistle complaints about state’s rights, and an assumption that its success proved that it wasn’t needed anymore. In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts gutted VRA provisions for enforcing preclearance. As a result, states in both the South and Republican-controlled swing states like Wisconsin and Ohio passed onerous legislation and policies to limit turnout.

Anderson details several forms of voter suppression. After the 2000 election debacle, Republicans exploited concerns about election security to elevate voter fraud into a national issue despite few cases of malicious intent. This allowed states to pass voter identification laws that go beyond federal recommendations and are often discriminatory, such as refusing to accept government-issued assisted housing IDs. Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) and licensing office closures in urban neighborhoods force voters to drive further out or lose work time to get an accepted ID. Efforts to overturn these laws in the courts are met with regurgitated talking points about voter fraud.

To pass the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, Republicans forced in provisions that allowed states to purge voter rolls of those who die or move out of state. However, states often remove infrequent voters against the intent of the law, and Ohio has purged 2 million voters from its rolls alone. Nearly 30 states use Interstate Crosscheck to remove duplicate names, but the system is marred by simplistic matching standards and an error rate as high as 99%. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach promoted Interstate Crosscheck to combat debunked anti-immigrant conspiracies and tried to enact an invasive national system in collaboration with Trump.

Gerrymandering, the redrawing of districts for political advantage, is now even more precise because of advanced mapping technology. Today, only 5% of citizens live in districts with competitive elections, and Republicans in Pennsylvania and Ohio can maintain or increase their legislative majority even if they lose the statewide popular vote. This is damaging because it enables Republicans to pass unpopular laws like the 2017 tax bill, and the only viable challengers to incumbents are extremist primary opponents.

It is possible to defeat these measures. In a 2017 Alabama special election, an extensive grassroots campaign elected the first Democrat Senator in 25 years after defeating toxic candidate Roy Moore. States are introducing Automatic Voter Registration to facilitate access to voting, and the 2018 midterm elections created the most diverse House of Representatives in the country’s history. Unfortunately, voter suppression still hampered reform efforts, particularly in the election of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who oversaw years of voter suppression efforts as secretary of state, refused to step down from overseeing the elections office, and ignored compromised voting machines. Anderson warns that voter suppression is now as much a threat to national unity as slavery and that the burden to maintain democracy is now on voters.