The lying game of phony-baloney election law reform from Dixie to Donald Trump
One hundred and ten years ago tomorrow, August 21, 1907, Georgia Governor Hoke Smith signed into law an amendment to the Georgia constitution that would become known as the Disenfranchisement Act of 1908. Although the law itself did not contain the word “black” or “Negro,” its intention was clear: to make it next to impossible for African-Americans to vote in Georgia elections.
There are laws in effect around our country today with less brazen names but no less nefarious intent. Somehow, they avoid the explicit mention of race, too. But it’s easy to tell what they are about. And if Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has its way, the disenfranchisement of people of color will soon be expanded considerably.
It’s instructive to take a closer look at Smith’s Disenfranchisement Act of 1908 to understand how voter suppression masquerades as electoral reform.
In order to be readmitted to the Union, Georgia and the other states of the rebellious Confederacy were forced to accede to the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, which required that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (That women were not included as “citizens” in this context was an error that would not be rectified until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment some fifty years later.) To circumvent such legal constraints, extra-legal white militias took to the use of force to intimidate black voters. Indeed, it was the massacre of black men on their way to the polls in 1876 that led the North to finally give up on the hoped for political transformation of the South that had been heralded by Reconstruction.
With Union enforcers of voting rights expelled in 1877, states such as Georgia devised other means to deny blacks the right to vote. Since the electoral landscape of the former Confederate states was a Democratic Party monoculture — recall the Republican Party then was the hated Party of Lincoln in the South— laws were enacted that prohibited blacks from voting in party primaries, effectively denying them any voice in the resulting single-party general elections. The Supreme Court, though, went unpersuaded by the usual “states rights” arguments which claimed that race-based disenfranchisement in primary elections a local prerogative, and these laws were eventually overturned.
By 1906 when Hoke Smith was running for governor, Georgia and other southern states were scrambling to look for ways to continuing the suppression of black voting without referring to race, and candidate Smith committed to such as a campaign promise. With the Disenfranchisement Act of 1908, he delivered on that promise.
Although this amendment to the Georgia constitution is often described requiring a literacy test for voters to pass, it is better understood by recognizing the alternative tests which it allows; after all, a literacy test at that time would have disqualified many white voters, as well. Indeed, such a test would remain a formidable requirement for many literate voters today:
[Demonstrate you] could read and write in English any paragraph of the state and federal constitutions or could understand or give a reasonable interpretation of any paragraph of such constitutions. (Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990, Chandler Davidson, Google Books)
The alternative tests for voter qualification in the Disenfranchisement Act of 1908 are, though, a sight to behold; they include (1) having served honorably in the forces of the Confederate states or descended from persons who had such service records; or (2) owning at least forty acres of land or property assessed for taxation at the value of at least five hundred dollars. Failing these, a voter candidate would only have to convince an almost certainly white registrar that he was of “good character” and could understand the duties of citizenship!
It’s easy to look back on these purported race-neutral attempts to protect the integrity of the electoral process and recognize them for the outrageous instruments of white supremacy that they were. But the very same shameful lying game about race and election law has experienced a resurgence in the last decade. And now the Trump administration is working overtime to cook up new pretexts to deny people of color the right to vote.
The current Republican effort to require photo ID to vote in federal elections was inaugurated with the Orwellian-named Help America Vote Act of 2002, and has since been extended by 33 states to their elections as of 2016. These obstacles to voting have been put in place in spite of the utter lack of evidence of consequential in-person voter fraud.
What is more, they disproportionately effect African-Americans, the poor, and the elderly. Even “free” voter ID cards, as advocated by former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, now Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, “can typically cost an individual between $75 and $175” and over $1,000, when legal fees are factored in, according to this report from Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice.
Voter ID laws are a newfangled poll tax on poor voters, nothing more and nothing less.
And now added to this mix of racially-motivated, phony-baloney election reform efforts is Donald Trump’s wild goose chase to ferret out non-existent widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election under the guise of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by Vice Chair Kris Kobach.
Kobach, former chairman of Kansas Republican Party and currently Kansas Secretary of State, is one of the nation’s leading advocates for documentary proof of citizenship laws which have been shown to keep thousands from the polls, according to this analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Trump’s commission’s efforts to support passage of federal laws for this purpose would more accurately be called the Disenfranchisement Act of 2018.
White supremacy is on the move in this country, but its most dangerous form is not the throng of loser neo-Nazis who paraded in Charlottesville with tiki torches last weekend or the problematic monuments to the heroes of the Confederacy still standing in the South. The real threat comes from people like Donald Trump and Kris Kobach and their allies in Republican-controlled state houses, who are hard at work to make it harder for people of color to vote. And we need to get hard at work confronting them.
