Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 5: Voter suppression under Jim Crow

Stetson Kennedy in his 1946 book Southern Exposure from which I've been quoting in this month's series looks at the voter suppression methods used in the segregated South to prevent African-Americans from voting.

Kennedy notes, "Chief among these is the poll tax." This was a tax voters required voters to pay to be allowed to vote. It was eventually outlawed by the 24th Amendment in 1964. But unscrupulous opponents of democracy can still look for backdoor ways to impose functional equivalents of a poll tax. For instance, a state could require a Voter ID for which a fee would be required.

Kennedy provides a table for the 1944 election to illustrate how effective voter-suppression measure were in the poll tax states, at that time eight of the 11 former Confederate states:

Note that these figures also mean that a substantial majority of the white voters were also no-shows on elections day. The poll tax affected poor whites as well as blacks, although they were a secondary rather than a primary target of the voter suppression measures.

But as Kennedy also describes, the poll tax was only one method used to deprive people of their voting rights. As we saw in yesterday's post, states were able to enact explicitly racist legislation. Because of the 15th Amendment of 1870, states could not explicitly ban African-American citizens from voting.

So they did things like this:

For instance, there are the various literacy qualifications for voting, which require that a person be able to read or write any part of the Constitution, or else "give a reasonable interpretation of same." Various states, however, exempt from this requirement Confederate veterans and their "lawful descendants," owners of forty acres of land or $500 worth of other property, or "persons of good character who understand the duties of citizenship." Although the law provides for an appeal to the courts for persons denied registration, the election is generally over by the time a court decision can be had.

Many registrars, instead of running the risk of refusing to register Negroes, simply require them to stand in a Jim Crow line-and let them stand until they become discouraged and leave. Also, in small communities it is quite common to appoint white women as registrars, who operate from their parlors where Negroes dare not intrude.

Today we don't see explicit poll taxes or property requirements for voting. But creating one hurdle after another aimed at areas where African-Americans and Latinos are more heavily concentrated is very much a part of the voter suppression efforts of today's Republican Party.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 20: The soul of Jim Crow goes marching on in voter suppression laws

Steven Wright explains some of the continuity betwee Jim Crow voter suppression measures directed against African-Americans in the 19th and 20th with their direct descendents in the 21st, like the recently adopted Georgia voter suppression law (Voter suppression bills are the first move in a bigger battle The Hill 04/18/21):

In the past, federal law provided safeguards to prevent legislatures from going too far in this direction [of voter restrictions]. Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, for example, required states like Georgia to receive federal approval of their redistricting plans. Indeed, in 1972, 1982, 1992, 1995, and 2001, the federal government or the federal courts objected to at least one of Georgia’s redistricting plans because the plan diminished the power of Black voters. Georgia isn’t an isolated example. As recently as 2017, federal courts have concluded that Texas Republicans intentionally discriminated against Latino and Black voters. But in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, eliminating this approval process, and destroying African Americans' strongest weapon to combat attacks on their political power.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, prominent African Americans have pursued several initiatives to combat the threat of discriminatory gerrymandering. Stacey Abrams, who served in the Georgia House during the 2011 redistricting, launched Fair Fight, in part, to combat the anticipated discriminatory redistricting process. Eric Holder, former U.S. attorney general, chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a political action committee that tries to counter discriminatory gerrymandering in swing states.

The twin assault of Georgia’s current voting restrictions and its upcoming racial gerrymandering represents merely the first wave of a larger effort to diminish African American voting strength. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 17: Georgian Jim Crow, 2021

Republicans today know that blocking access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes.

Historian Jason Morgan Ward explains the precedents for Georgia's new voter suppression law in Georgia’s Voter Law Is Called ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ for a Reason New York Times 03/31/2021.

The Republicans' current stream of voter suppression laws and related chicanery is the same basic approach used by the enemies of Reconstruction after the Civil War to justify the disenfranchisement of black citizens. The disenfranchisement was de facto. The 14th Amendment flatly banned denying people the right to vote based on race.

So they used direct violence and threats along with laws and electoral practices that drastically reduced the number of African-American voters. This is important, because one Republican defense of the current round of voter-suppression laws is that they are not like the practices in former Confederate states during the Jim Crow era because none of the current laws specifically ban African-Americans from voting. The post-Reconstruction voter suppression didn't do that, either.

As Ward writes of voter suppression then and now:

The methods in the fight against voting rights have a common objective — an electorate narrowed along predictable and demonstrable fault lines. Many present-day proponents of voting restrictions are quick to distance themselves from the racist aims and attitudes of their forebears, but the most durable and enduring attacks on voting rights have long cloaked their goals in race-neutral language — at least in writing. [my emphasis]

And referring to the combination of violence and legalistic suppression of votes through most of the 20th century, he refers to former Georgia Gov. Eurgenen Talmadge in the 1940s:

Mr. Talmadge egged on supporters who intimidated and attacked Black voters, but his most enduring and effective tactics look much more like present-day voter suppression tactics. As the Emory researcher Hannah Charak has documented, Mr. Talmadge quietly collaborated with sympathetic local officials on illegal registration purges and blanketed the state with “challenge forms” that white residents could use to dispute Black votes.

Voter suppression tactics like literacy tests and Georgia’s infamous county unit system delivered racist leadership like Mr. Talmadge (and his son) while withstanding legal challenges and Supreme Court rulings for decades in part because such measures commonly avoided mention of race. [my emphasis]

The linked article on the county unit system summarizes its effect this way, "In effect, the system of allotting votes by county, with little regard for population differences, allowed rural counties to control Georgia elections by minimizing the impact of the growing urban centers, particularly Atlanta."

Trump v. New York and Republican voter suppression efforts

David Gans flags the case of Trump v. New York currently being argued before the Supreme Court as a real-world test of how serious the SCOTUS conservatives (or rightwing radicals) are about their "originalist" view of Constitutional interpretation.

As he puts it, "Trump v. New York poses a basic test of constitutional fidelity to long settled constitutional principles at the core of our democracy. If Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Supreme Court’s conservative originalists fail this test, it will go a long way to defining the Roberts court going forward."

This case involves the national census and Trump's argument that people "who are not in a lawful immigration status" should not be counted. This is a transparent attempt to reduce Congressional representation for states like New York and California who have large Latino immigrant populations.

Gans explains just how clear and explicit the background of the Constitutional provisions affecting the census and the Congressional history of their passage are on the idea that everyone should be included in the census count.

The SCOTUSblog has a number of articles on the case listed here. Nina Perales in her 11/28/2020 contribution to Symposium: A not-at-all disguised attempt to shift power away from Latino voters explains that - not surprisingly for the Trump-Pence Administration - the parameters for defining who falls outside the Trumpian parameters for being counted. Their approach is directed by what is known as "the apportionment memorandum." which Perales argues is straight-up illegal. :

... the apportionment memorandum excludes individuals who, although lacking the rights of U.S. citizens and authorized immigrants, are undoubtedly “whole persons” living in the United States. In this way, the memorandum raises the specter of the infamous three-fifths rule, under which our Constitution – prior to the 14th Amendment – mandated that enslaved persons be counted as three-fifths of free individuals for the purposes of congressional apportionment, thus increasing the political power of slavery states.

The apportionment memorandum not only illegally excludes immigrants living in the country without authorization from the apportionment count, it uses them as the stalking horses to mask its nakedly political goal – to reduce representation in Congress, and the Electoral College, of all the people living in states with the largest Latino populations.

Draped in the language of immigration enforcement (the apportionment memorandum talks about individuals “who are not in a lawful immigration status” and promoting “respect for the law”), the memorandum singles out California and asserts that its residents should properly lose “two or three” congressional seats. When California loses “two or three” congressional seats, many millions of not undocumented people also lose representation. [my emphasis]

In calling it Trumpian, though, we shouldn't forget that this is part of the larger Republican Party program of voter suppression and discrimination against non-white citizens and resident. In 2020, Trumpism is the Republican Party.

in her Argument Analysis of 11/30/2020 on the SCOTUS oral arguments this week, Amy Howe gives us an insight into some of the arguments being made.

The coup plans seem to be already going into action

It looks like the Trump coup plan is already being put into motion:

Kate McGee et al, Biden camp cancels multiple Texas events after a "Trump Train" surrounded a campaign bus Texas Tribune 10/31/2020

Lois Beckett and Alexandra Villarreal, Biden campaign says Trump supporters tried to force bus off highway 11/01/2020

Matt Mathers, Biden event in Texas cancelled as 'armed' Trump supporters threaten campaign bus Independent 10/31/2020

Apparently, this action was popular in some quarters:

From the Texas Tribune coverage:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a Friday incident in which a group of Trump supporters, driving trucks and waving Trump flags, surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus as it drove up I-35 in Hays County, a law enforcement official confirmed to The Texas Tribune Saturday.

The confrontation, captured on video, featured at least one minor collision and led to Texas Democrats canceling three scheduled campaign events on Friday. The campaign officials cited “safety concerns” for the cancellations.

There's also this:

Texas Republicans have asked a federal judge to throw out 100,000 ballots in Harris County cast through curbside voting. They drew Judge Andrew Hanen, one of the most notoriously partisan Republican judges in the entire federal judiciary. This is alarming. https://t.co/VODOZrCoUF

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 31, 2020

Wow: One of the Republicans asking a federal judge to throw out more than 117,000 valid ballots in Harris County is a COVID and QAnon conspiracy theorist. Great reporting from @ehananoki. https://t.co/roTEm4vMIM pic.twitter.com/8KGNQvGAow

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 31, 2020

Stern in his Slate article linked in his tweet (Texas Republicans Ask Federal Judge to Throw Out 117,000 Legally Cast Ballots 10/31/2020) explains in more detail what a crassly partisan-political move it is and how flimsy the legal claims behind it are.

The Confederate symbolism would have been more completed if the Klan-style attempted vehicular homicide and the frivolous lawsuit relying on a corrupted judiciary had taken place in South Carolina rather than Texas.

But one of the Carolinas also got into the act, as Julia Craven describes (North Carolina’s Police Attack on Election Marchers Had a Long History Behind It Slate 10/31/2020):

On Saturday, Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and city police pepper sprayed a crowd of about 200 people who were peacefully marching to the polls in Graham, North Carolina without warning and on slim reasoning. Graham police claimed that protesters didn’t have the adequate permits to close off the road, while the Alamance County sheriff’s office said that the march was shut down out of “concerns for the safety of all.”

If it is at all difficult to understand how a police department could act so heinously—particularly when children and elderly community members are present within the crowd— then it’s important for one to grasp the context that the law enforcement operates within. ...

Voter intimidation is an omnipresent concern in North Carolina, a state that has tried to prevent Black and brown voters from casting ballots with “surgical precision” since Reconstruction. During the late 1800s, a high-level white supremacist campaign in North Carolina went to extreme acts of violence - including massacring Black residents in Wilmington - in order to regain political power within the state. Less outwardly violent voter suppression tactics have cropped up in the state following the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, such as North Carolina’s infamous voter I.D. law and gerrymandering so precise that every district in the state had to be redrawn. [my emphasis]

The chances of a Republican coup to keep Trump in office even if he loses the votes depends in significant part on how big the margin for Biden is. It should not be that way. But that's how badly wounded American democracy already is.

Again on the Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbard controversy

Since I mentioned the current Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbart flap in a long previous post, I'm going to follow up with a couple of links and some comments.

The Clinton statements in question came in an October 17 interview with David Plouffe on his podcast, Campaign HQ. The interview is around 45 minutes, and an interesting and informative one. Hillary is smart and has an incredible amount of experience in politics and law.

The Tulsi Gabbart moment comes in the second half. PolitiFact has provided a partial transcript that includes the Gabbart part. (Miriam Valverde, In Context: Hillary Clinton on Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump campaign and Russia 10/22/2019) This is from the transcript, talking about the 2020 general election and assuming that Trump will be the Republican candidate:

Clinton: "Well, I think there's going to be two parts and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: ‘Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy because the other guy is going to do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I'm going to show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they're on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you're going to see them and you're going to see that person doing these horrible things.’"

"They're also going to do third party again. And I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset."

Plouffe: (Inaudible)

Clinton: "Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally.

"And so, they know they can't win without a third party candidate and, so, I don't know who it's going to be it but I will guarantee you they'll have a vigorous third party challenge in the key states that they most need it."

The part that PolitiFact quotes begins in the podcast at around 33:00 minutes.

After listening to the whole podcast, my judgment is still that Clinton was strongly implying that Tulsi Gabbard is being groomed by Russia to be a spoiler third party candidate. She doesn't use Gabbard's name, but I've yet to see anyone suggest she was talking about Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Amy Klobuchar. Even in the quote included above, it also sounds like she's implying that Gabbard is a "Russian asset" like she specifically accuses Jill Stein of being.

Anyone can misspeak. But Hillary Clinton is not exactly new to giving media interviews. And as the rest of the interview shows, she's able to deliver her points articulately and convincingly. Earlier in the interview at around 22:00, she talks about Trump's campaign and Russian interference and how she expects it to happen again in 2020. After the interview is over, Plouffe also assumed that she was talking about Tulsi Gabbard in that section quoted above.

So that's my reading of what she was saying about Tulsi Gabbard without naming her explicitly. And I won't recap here what I said about why that's problematic in my earlier post.

But I would also encourage people to listen to the postcast. For one thing, it's an illustration of how impressive Hillary Clinton comes across in this format, as opposed to her stump speech style. And she's providing some well-informed political analysis here. She comes across very strongly on her criticism of voter suppression.

But I will add that, unlike what she presents in this podcast, I haven't seen the evidence from the post-election voting and polling analyses that the third party voting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was decisive to the 2016 Electoral College outcome.