published a long essay<\/a> on the deep history of voter suppression in places like Georgia \u2014 which goes all the way back to the years immediately after the Union victory in the Civil War. I think many people are at least somewhat aware of the parallels between what Southern Democrats did in the late nineteenth century and what Republicans are doing today, but they may not realize how concrete and literal those parallels actually are. Can you talk about the very direct linkages between earlier efforts at disenfranchising black voters and what\u2019s happening right now?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n Ari Berman<\/dt>\n \n There\u2019s both a pattern that\u2019s familiar and specific parallels. First the pattern: the familiar pattern is that you had the enfranchisement of new voters during Reconstruction. It was black voters who turned out in record numbers and were elected. Then you had efforts at violence, fraud, and intimidation to try to suppress black votes. That worked for a time, but when black voters were disenfranchised it was really through legal means like literacy tests, poll taxes, and things like that, which happened when states changed their constitutions a while after the end of Reconstruction. Reconstruction is often thought to have ended in 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South, but blacks still voted in a bunch of states in the South through that period. It wasn’t until Mississippi adopted its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890 that Southern states tried to figure out a way to completely disenfranchise them through what were thought of as \u201clegal\u201d means.<\/p>\n
That same kind of process is playing out today: you had the enfranchisement of new groups, manifested in higher turnout in 2020, and you had an attempt to try to overturn the election through extralegal means, including an insurrection. Then, in 2021, you have the so-called legal means to try to disenfranchise people through changes to election law. Those are the big-picture similarities.<\/p>\n
The more specific similarities are, number one, the language: Jim Crow never actually said \u201cwe want to disenfranchise black voters.\u201d It was technically race neutral, it\u2019s just that everyone knew who the target was. The same thing is happening today. Georgia Republicans aren’t saying \u201cwe want to disenfranchise black voters,\u201d but everyone knows that’s their target, because that’s the strongest constituency of the Democratic Party. Number two, even back then you had Southern white Democrats in Mississippi \u2014 because remember that Democrats were the segregationist party back then and Republicans were the party of civil rights, and that’s flipped \u2014 who were arguing that they were expanding voting rights. They either argued they were expanding voting rights or they argued they were protecting the sanctity or purity of the ballot. That same language is being used by Republicans today.<\/p>\n
The last thing is that in the nineteenth century they also made it easier to overturn elections by taking away power from bipartisan election officials, and either gave it to partisan election officials or took power from voters to appoint their election officials. That kind of pattern is playing out in states like Georgia and Texas today. So there are big picture parallels, but also a lot of specific similarities in terms of the nature of the laws themselves.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Luke Savage<\/dt>\n \n Legislation intended to curtail the current Republican offensive against voting rights is currently sitting before Congress in the form of H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Both face obstruction from the filibuster and from Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to ask you to speculate on what the exact outcome will be here, but let\u2019s assume for a second that the filibuster remains in place: What\u2019s the worst-case scenario if these two bills, and particularly H.R. 1, aren\u2019t<\/i> passed? What do subsequent elections from the 2022 midterms on look like if the current state-level offensive against voting rights succeeds in its main ambitions?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n Ari Berman<\/dt>\n \n If the federal legislation fails, it\u2019s going to embolden Republicans to pass more sweeping voter suppression laws without fear of any kind of consequence. That could lead to reduced Democratic turnout and higher levels of voter suppression, which could enable Republicans to take back power in Congress and retain power at the state level in 2022 and 2024. That could allow them to not certify elections in 2022 and 2024 so that even if Democrats are able to overcome the suppression measures, Republicans will still control the outcome of the elections and essentially nullify the will of the voters. That’s the worst-case scenario here. Basically, we’ll be in a situation where an election is only viewed as legitimate if Republicans win, and there’s no way that you could describe that as a democracy \u2014 where only one side is acknowledged as being able to fairly win an election.<\/p>\n
That just goes against all the tenets of what it means to be a democracy. That\u2019s the worst-case outcome, and I see it as a very likely outcome \u2014 especially if Democrats fail to do anything. That’s another parallel that I see with Reconstruction: back then, Southern Democrats were passing all of these voter suppression laws and the only thing they were concerned about was what Congress might do, and when Congress didn’t pass federal legislation to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment and protect voting rights, Southern states just felt completely emboldened to do whatever they wanted.<\/p>\n
To some extent, that\u2019s the same way Republicans feel right now. I don’t think they fear the voters because they feel like they’re manipulating them \u2014 they are not worried about a voter backlash. They also don’t fear the courts, because those are now so dominated by Trump appointees. The only thing they fear is what Democrats can do in Congress, and if the Democrats don’t do anything, it’s very unlikely they’re going to retain both houses of Congress in 2022.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n <\/dl>\n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Though it has yet to fully register as the national story it deserves to be, America is currently in the throes of what may well be the most concerted effort at voter suppression in living memory. Since the beginning of the year, Republican state legislators have introduced a deluge of new laws intended to restrict [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3013,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3013"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192729,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192728\/revisions\/192729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}