Voter Disenfranchisement
An essay by Jim Wood of Sodus, NY
This year marked the fiftieth year of my personal right to vote.
I can’t remember a year I haven’t voted for mostly Democrats on the ballot. Now, you might assume I’m going to signal to the reader my defection to the right or to Trump or at least to “Republicanism”. Or maybe to, at least, give up voting altogether in an overly rancorous, vitriolic and highly partisan era. However, you would be wrong to anticipate such a personal shift. Instead, I am filled with energy to renew, even expand my commitment to voting Democratic most of the time. OK, virtually all the time.
What is the source of this continuous desire? It is the overwhelming evidence that Republican political strategy, in large part, is to disenfranchise its political enemies like Southern Democrats did in my youth. The 2018 midterms underscored a concerted and successful pattern to deny people access to the ballot. High profile examples included questionable voter purges disproportionately impacting Democratic voters in Georgia, impossible to meet residency requirements suppressing the Native American vote in North Dakota and denial of student voting at a predominantly Black College in Alabama. The most extreme example was in Georgia where we saw Stacey Abrams lose the Georgia Governorship by a margin that was less than the number of Democrats unfairly purged from the voting lists by her opponent, Secretary of State, Brian Kemp.
Add the voter suppression efforts of ending early voting and closing polling places in precincts where their opponents have traditionally voted against them and the Republican strategic pattern becomes pervasive. Republican strategists have showed no shame as they used their control in legislatures and governorships in at least a dozen states, north, south east and west to gerrymander districts in their favor and to block all efforts to build non-partisan commissions to create fair voting districts.
At Wayne Action for Racial Equality, we recognize voter suppression and gerrymandering as always discriminatory and often racist. Gerrymandering, voter list purges, making voting less accessible to working people and the mobility challenged, voting district closures that result in long waits to vote for the poor and people of color and other voting irregularities help form the bedrock of institutional and structural racism.
My voting experiences in New York are sublime in comparison. I have never waited more than 5 minutes to cast a ballot. I greet my poll workers by name. An atmosphere of convivial friendliness prevails. As I watched the 2016 midterm results unfold while visiting my brother in a nursing home in Broward County, Florida, I was in the eye of that state’s election dysfunction. Long waits to vote and to process those votes are the norm there. Election officials have a notoriety unsurpassed anywhere else in the country and, in 2000, distorted national election results.
We don’t need to look hard or dig deeply into the electoral process in Florida, Georgia, North Dakota and Alabama to see Republican disenfranchisement efforts. However, it takes real study to pull back the cover on widespread Republican gerrymandering. According to a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, Republican governments in Michigan, North Carolina, Texas and Ohio have gerrymandered so successfully that even when Democrats receive more votes in the aggregate across the states, they lose more Congressional district races because of the extreme gerrymandering.
My voting experience is far from the experience of groups marginalized by our society. For people of color and the poor in so many areas, voting is a struggle and a challenge. The way I see it voter suppression is affirmative action for white politicians who can’t convince most of their constituents that their ideas have salience. Unlike true affirmative action, it has no legitimate basis. It does not attempt to right a past wrong that disadvantages a victim. Voter suppression spins away from the merits of true affirmative action, to grant advantage to the truly undeserving. It is entitlement. The entitlement gives to Republican candidates a disproportionate share of constituents most likely to share racial, economic and cultural affinity with voter suppression politicians. Those constituencies are given the perks of comfort voting. Comfort voting is what I, a white, rural New Yorker enjoys in the solid Republican County of Wayne, New York. Comfort voting is low voting machine to voter ratios which lead to no wait voting with no lines stretching around the block. Comfort voting leads to no repercussions at work for late arrival after waiting in lines for 3 or 4 hours. Comfort voting is the absence of officials purging voter rolls of tens of thousands of voters because their voting signatures don’t match their signatures in their social security records and/or other data bases. All of these discriminatory practices erode voter confidence, lower voter participation in already marginalized populations and take America back to its days of voter intimidation where Americans could be beaten or worse for attempting to vote. America must do better than this!
Jim Wood
Sodus, NY
Citizens' Response Network of Wayne County, NY 