Republican attempts to exclude African Americans from the polls echoes efforts by Southern whites that enabled the Jim Crow era.
Brian Kemp currently holds two significant positions in Georgia politics, and he has been in the news for both of them. As the Republican nominee for governor, he is engaged in a fierce battle with Democrat Stacey Abrams, who, if she wins, would be the first female African-American governor in United States history. Polling indicates an extremely close race, one that could be decided by tens of thousands votes.
Kemp is also Georgia’s current secretary of state, where one of his responsibilities is to oversee state elections. In that capacity, he has been engaged in a systematic campaign to restrict the number of Georgians allowed to cast ballots. In July 2017, Kemp’s office purged nearly 600,000 people, or 8 percent of the state’s registered voters, from the rolls; an estimated 107,000 of them were cut simply because they hadn’t voted in recent elections. This year, Kemp has blocked the registration of 53,000 state residents, 70 percent of whom are African-American and therefore could be reasonably expected to vote for Abrams.
Both moves were entirely legal. Georgia, plus at least eight other states, has a “use it or lose” law that allows it to cancel voter registrations if the person hasn’t voted in recent elections. The state also has an “exact match” law, enacted last year, whereby a voter registration application must be identical to the information on file with Georgia’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration; if they don’t match, or no such information is on file, then the registration is put on hold until the applicant can provide additional documents to prove their identity. That’s why more than 50,000 applicants are on hold. (They can still vote, with a photo ID, but no doubt their pending status will discourage many.)
Georgia is only one of a number of states attempting to artificially suppress the (Democratic) vote, making voting rights a key issue in this election—not to mention 2020, when Donald Trump seeks a second term. With critics insisting that many state laws restricting voter registration are unconstitutionally discriminatory, a continued series of court tests is inevitable. The Supreme Court thus may be the ultimate arbiters of who is allowed to vote and who is not. This is not the first time the court has been cast in such a role, and history does not beget optimism.
Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court presided over a three-decades long dismantling of what seemed to be a constitutional guarantee of the right to vote for African-Americans. The groundwork was laid in May of that year, when, in United States v. Reese, the court determined that the 15th Amendment, which states that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged…on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” did not mean what it seemed to mean.
As Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in a companion case, the amendment “confers no right to vote. That is the exclusive prerogative of the states. It does confer a right not to be excluded from voting by reason of race, color or previous condition of servitude, and this is all the right that Congress can enforce.” Bradley thus transferred the burden of proof from the government that has denied someone’s right to vote to the person whose right has been denied, a bar that would prove impossibly high.
Source: newrepublic.com
Posts
Comments
Post a Comment