3/31/21
Yes, Georgia’s new supremely racist voting law makes it illegal to bring food or water to people—meaning Black voters—waiting in long lines that are also the result of voter suppression. But it also seeks to disenfranchise Black voters in much more mundane ways, like making it harder to register. This is actually a kind of doubling-down, twofold approach to voter suppression efforts intended to keep the “wrong” sort of people from the polls. Because the history of America’s voter registration laws, like pretty much everything else in this country, is steeped in racism and nativism. During the colonial and revolutionary eras, voting was a right conferred upon those who were white, male and landholding. As in Britain, this requirement rested on the absurd notion that only white men who owned property had a bona fide “stake in society,” meaning a true commitment to the well-being of their communities. The 1788 ratification of the Constitution left suffrage matters to individual states. The states, in turn, overwhelmingly kept voting rights limited to wealthy white guys, leaving just 6 percent of the country eligible to vote in the first presidential election. The Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling established that American citizenship did not extend to people “imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not.” Exclusion from citizenship, of course, meant exclusion from voting rights.
The ruling suggested this was just as well, since Black folks were considered “unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations.” Just eight years later, the Southern Confederacy’s loss in the Civil War would result in Black emancipation and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, which enshrined Black citizenship and voting rights in the Constitution. Black suffrage, which immediately came under assault by violent white supremacists, would be rescinded under Jim Crow—a system that borrowed heavily from early registration laws. Those laws would endure for nearly a century until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was finally passed to ensure Black suffrage. So white conservatives have spent nearly every day since trying to dismantle the law. They succeeded greatly with SCOTUS’s defanging of a key provision in 2013. The shameless transparent racism of the state’s new voting law is echoed in a deluge of voter disenfranchisement proposals pending in statehouses across the country — including 47 that pertain to “voter registration, 38 that would purge people from the voter rolls and 24 dealing with in-person early voting.” Suppression on top of suppression, ad infinitum.