What is Voter Suppression?
“Voter suppression,” also known as “caging,” is defined as any effort, either legal or illegal, by way of laws, administrative rules, and/or tactics that prevents eligible voters from registering to vote or voting altogether. Because the United States Constitution did not always explicitly include suffrage, the history of voter suppression in the United States can be traced to the history of voting rights. Voter suppression remains prevalent and is ingrained into our political culture.
Generally, restrictive voting requirements such as complex Voter ID laws, limited early voting and felony disenfranchisement are used as examples of voter suppression. However, President Trump’s recent pushback on Mail- In Ballots in the upcoming general election is being examined as a new form of voter suppression.
A Brief History
In the original version of the Constitution, it was left entirely up to the states to determine who should be counted under “the people” given the right to vote. Only white, land owning men and in the case of four states, freed African American men, were allowed to cast a ballot in an election.
After the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed to “grant equality” to African Americans in the South. Although the Thirteenth Amendment was written with the intent of abolishing slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to ensure “equal protection under the laws” for Black people, the Fifteenth Amendment did not give them voting rights immediately. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 made it illegal for states to disenfranchise “voters on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Following the Reconstruction period, a political realignment occurred within the South that led to the birth of a new type of political identity- conservative Democrats, also known as “Dixiecrats.” Dixiecrats actively worked against anti-voter suppression laws. During the Jim Crow era, voting laws were purposefully created to isolate poor, uneducated citizens by having, for example, literacy tests, poll taxes and even “whites only” primaries, which went against federal law. Literacy tests posed a threat to former slaves who never learned to read and poll taxes were meant to discourage poor Blacks and whites from even showing up. However, white men who could not pass a voting literacy test were still able to vote because of the “Grandfather Clause,” which was ruled unconstitutional in 1915. Poll taxes were issued until 1966 with the creation of the 24th Amendment and literacy tests were made illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which according to the US Department of Justice, banned any testing to qualify voters on the basis of education, literacy or fluency in English.
Mail-In Ballots/Absentee Voting
In lieu of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a peaked interest in the concept of absentee voting by mail. Although it is not a new phenomenon, mail-in ballots are highly expected to be a popular form of voting in the upcoming 2020 presidential election because of the health and safety concerns surrounding in-person polls. Not so shockingly, President Trump has been outspoken in his opposition to the many solutions vote-by-mail offers.
The president’s disapproval of voter’s submitting an absentee ballot in the election began in July, when he tweeted mail voting was a “catastrophic failure” with no accurate count, warning that 2020 would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” Since then, Trump continued to push the false narrative that voting by mail resulted in voter fraud, which is an extremely rare occurrence. On September 22nd at the White House, Trump said mail in ballots “cheat” and that they were “very dangerous for this country because of cheaters.” These repeatedly proven false claims are nothing short of a tactic to scare off voters from exercising their right to vote, and persuade them to not show up to the polls on November 3rd. This has been understood to be a blatant act of voter suppression. The president, however, takes it a step further by attempting to incite fear in not just Black and minority voters, but anyone who plans to vote for Joe Biden.
Asked on Fox & Friends about Hillary Clinton accusing him of sabotaging the Postal Service, Trump immediately pivots to bashing Clinton and never denies that that’s what he’s up to pic.twitter.com/zlEMwXxquw
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2020
Since the USPS postmaster general Louis Dejoy took over in June of this year, an investigation of Dejoy and slower mail delivery in recent primary elections was called by Democrats in Congress. An outpour of support to “Save the Post Office” filled social media when the Trump administration called the Postal Service “a joke” and said he wouldn’t see through the approval of any emergency funds for it unless there was a quadruple increase on package delivery prices.. He even went as far as to threaten the life of the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act if the bills allotted any money to bail out the bankrupt postal agency.
President Trump’s and the congressional Republican’s efforts to combat the mail-in vote serves as a modern day example of voter suppression. It should be of little to no surprise that the President knowingly attempts to create a panic-stricken public and stop people from doing what he fears most: voting him out.
How This Affects BIPOC Today
The foundational principles of voter suppression stem from racist beliefs dating back to Jim Crow and slavery, but also hold true to attempts by politicians and communities today to discourage typically poor, low income minorities from voting. The gerrymandering of neighborhoods, poll watcher intimidation, and more recently, the discouragement of mail-in ballots all play into the larger goal of “fixing” elections and keeping Black and brown citizens out of their own government.