During the Jim Crow era, many laws were passed that made it extremely difficult for black men and women to vote. These laws have since been overturned by way of the Brown v. Board of Education case, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act but racially motivated voter discrimination has not ended. The following is a breakdown of current voter discrimination and its effects on people of color (POC) in the United States.
- In the South, a law was passed in the late 19th century which permanently stripped the right to vote from former felons. Authorities during this time were granted the ability to arrest on charges of loitering and vagrancy. Police targeted black people for these minor offenses and incarcerated them at a disproportionate rate. Once they had either served their time or were let go, none of these men were allowed to vote.
Recently, in Florida, a law was passed that barred all ex-felons from voting unless they could pay back all of their court fees. Of the current 1 million former felons in Florida, between 70% – 80% of them are unable to pay these fees. Although white people make up a majority of Florida’s ex-felons, black people are disproportionately misrepresented. Over one in every five black voters in all of the state will not be able to vote in the 2020 election.
- Poll Tax was another weapon that Southern states used during the Jim Crow era to dilute the black vote. It’s as simple as it sounds. To vote in the election, you had to pay a fee. Black men, having been recently unbound from slavery and lacking any intergenerational wealth opportunities, did not have the money to pay this fee. Women, on the other hand, didn’t even have the right to vote yet.
Florida’s former-felon “pay to vote” system is just another example of how states are making it harder for POC to vote.
- Sometimes in the Jim Crow South, black citizens that had registered to vote were abruptly removed from voting rolls. They weren’t allowed to re-register until after the election. In Louisiana in 1896, 130,000 black voters were registered to vote. Only four years later, the state removed all but 5,000 from the registry.
Different forms of voter perjury are still happening today. In Ohio, laws allow state officials to remove thousands of inactive voters from registration rolls at a time. In 2019, an investigator found that of the 235,000 people that were put on the Ohio purge list, 40,000 of them–approximately one in five–were found to be active voters. Of the 40,000, many claimed that they never received notice that they were being removed from voting rolls.
In 2017, Georgia passed a law that made it mandatory for voters’ names on registration records to “perfectly match” those on their identification. If they didn’t, their registration was blocked. Of the affected voters whose vote was then never cast, 80% were people of color.
In 2013, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts claimed that the Jim Crow voter suppression tactics that necessitated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not exist anymore. The Republican majority Supreme Court ruled (5-4) that states that had previously racially discriminated against voters did not have to clear any voting regulation changes with the federal government. This decision was called Shelby County v. Holder.
Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Texas announced its implementation of strict voter ID laws. Mississippi and Alabama soon followed suit. In response, several Republican officials have acknowledged that voter ID laws help suppress POC’s votes.
Voter suppression and systemic racism are closely related and are both very real, very pressing problems.
References
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/01/us/voter-suppression-jim-crow-blake/index.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/effects-shelby-county-v-holder
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/us/florida-felons-voting-rights
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/florida-felons-voting
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/11/17448742/ohio-voter-purge-supreme-court-ruling
https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws