[EL] "disfranchisement"

[Morgan Kousser]

      If you look at the course of southern suffrage restriction in the 
late 19th and early 20th centuries and the somewhat parallel, though 
more limited efforts in the North at the same time, you will notice that 
the restrictions happened gradually, and that they were never absolutely 
complete.
     Horrific violence pushed some African-Americans and poor whites out 
of the electorate, at least temporarily.  Ballot box stuffing was much 
more effective, but could work only after violence and the takeover of 
at least local governments had taken place.  Then came registration 
laws, which could be designed to reduce opposition vote totals by 
requiring it months before an election, requiring registrants to be 
vouched for by already registered voters, and/or requiring everyone to 
present their registration certificates at the polls.
      Gerrymandering, at-large elections, annexations, de-annexations, 
switching to appointive officials, and other structural laws gave 
opposition parties and their members less incentive to vote.  Secret 
ballot laws with provisions that stopped anyone except election 
officials (all Democrats) from assisting illiterates further cut down 
voting directly and, by discouraging the opposition, indirectly.  So did 
the "8-box" laws adopted in SC and elsewhere.  Long and complicated 
ballots, often without party labels, discouraged people from voting 
whose English wasn't perfect, which was true of a lot of non-southerners 
in the age of immigration, as well as of southerners of both races.
     Poll taxes had substantial effects, and by the 1930s, they probably 
discouraged lower-class white women more than anyone else.  Poor 
families might possibly able to afford to pay the poll tax for one, but 
not two, and politics was a "man's business."  They could always, I 
suppose, have gone without eating another couple of days a year.
     Literacy tests could be mastered, perhaps, but could be made very 
difficult even if they were fairly administered.  Could the average 
voter now name their district attorney AND state legislator AND 
lieutenant governor, as they had to in Georgia in the late 1950s?  Were 
people who tried to register anew in Georgia then, but who could not 
answer all the questions satisfactorily "disfranchised"?
     Or consider the re-enfranchisement of southern blacks.  Probably 
about 3.5% of blacks could vote in the South in 1940.  Then came Smith 
v. Allwright, and it became possible to vote in Democratic primaries.  
That increased registration in Georgia dramatically, though less so in 
other states.  Were the new registrants suddenly "enfranchised"?  Their 
votes suddenly possibly mattered collectively, so their incentives 
changed.  Poll taxes were repealed in several states, further 
diminishing barriers, and many African-Americans recognized that others 
in their group could and would register and vote, so their votes would 
make a difference, as well.  It became more collectively rational to 
vote, so individuals had more of an incentive.
     It was never a matter of ones and zeroes (to avoid saying "black 
and white"), but of probabilities; never absolute disfranchisement or 
absolute enfranchisement.  Registration and turnout have always been 
continuous variables, not discrete ones, in American history.  I could 
make exactly the same argument about property-based suffrage, female 
voting participation after 1919, etc., and I have in several publications.
     In Macon County, Alabama in the 1950s, you could register if you 
were black if you were willing to stand in line all day, starting very 
early in the morning on one of the few days when the registrar's office 
was open, and if you were willing to come back next week or next month 
if the line didn't move quite far enough that day, AND if you, with your 
graduate degree (the county had the highest percentage of blacks with 
graduate degrees of any county in the country, as I recall) managed to 
pass the literacy test to the satisfaction of the high-school-educated 
registrar.  And by the time that the "Tuskegee Gerrymander" law passed, 
enough blacks had managed to register to pose quite a threat.  Were the 
rest "disfranchised" or simply not willing to pay quite that high a price?
   In the closing argument in the recent TX voter id case, one of the 
judges asked John Hughes, the lawyer for TX, whether it was reasonable 
to force a prospective voter to travel as much as 200 miles roundtrip to 
get a voter id card.  Hughes said that those people chose to live in 
those places, implying that they weren't disfranchised, but just 
inconvenienced in ways they were used to.
     I abandoned the word "disfranchisement" in the subtitle of The 
Shaping of Southern Politics when I turned my dissertation into a book 
because of the incrementalist argument above, and while I know that the 
word can't and shouldn't be abandoned, I do think that at least on this 
list, full of knowledgeable people, its use should be nuanced and 
historically informed.
     Consider this formulation, then:  Any law that decreases the 
probability that anyone will register or will vote, even by reducing the 
likelihood that other members of their class or race or other group will 
vote, would qualify as a disfranchising law.  And if it reduces the 
probability from 20% to 0%, is that any different from reducing it from 
60% to 40%? That's at least how I read both the history of the suffrage 
in the U.S. and the history of laws and legal cases about the suffrage.
Morgan