[EL] "disfranchisement"

Sun Sep 16 08:45:10 PDT 2012

an ode to a passing effective effort.

Well I think we are watching this election turn into a train wreck in slow motion.  

Nothing can really be done to undo the problem before the election.  Even if the Courts rule in favor of the plaintiffs and enjoin the identification statutes et al, the harm is already done.  People are confused and frightened 

This is the strategy that Karl Rove used to take over Texas.  I have lived through this movie before.  Texas was a nominal Democratic right of center state until the late 198os and early 1990s.   Rove used felons lists and signs warning blacks that they could be arrested if they voted.  Press conferences were held in the Rio Grande Valley announcing that the US Attorneys were launching investigations into election fraud.  Never mind none was ever found.  Local election officials were told to purge the polls.  Never mind that the lists were 90% inaccurate.  On election day Republican Poll watchers slowed down the lines in minority areas by challenging everyone to produce ids   Sound familiar.  Minority boxes ran short of ballots and were delayed in getting the supply supplemented.  

Never mind that we litigated most of these things and had the enforcement enjoined.  It scared the minority and the voters.     It was all to scare the minority voters.  And it worked and mark my word it will this November in the rust belt and in the other close states.  

It is easy to point fingers.  Some say that the Department of Justice has taken some dives on this sort of thing-- read Georgia.  Or that the Democratic party was too busy to make plans to deal with them  Or that Minority organizations were slow to litigate these things.  Never mind that these are not true.  In sum,  true or not and however else the minority the poor voters are intimidated and the numbers will reflect it.  

Sad commentary on our election system--when to win one tries to intimidate the minority and the poor and then professes that he or she is a Christian of the first water.   We have all seen this movie before.  It is true that this too will pass.    But not soon enough.

> Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:20:31 -0700
> From: kousser at hss.caltech.edu
> To: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
> Subject: [EL] "disfranchisement"
> 
> 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
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