Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Taking Their Votes Away - Part 1

The United States has a long and debasing history of disenfranchising entire classes of its people.  Most egregious, of course, were the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans and its long-term aftermath: Jim Crow, segregation, and most recently mass incarceration of African Americans.  But even at the very founding of our country, the vote was withheld not only from Native Americans and African Americans—both enslaved and free—but also from all women and white men who didn’t own land.

This is the first of two posts examining the United States’ different current uses of voter suppression.  In  this first post, I’ll look at:
  1.    incarceration and the related felony disenfranchisement and
  2.    gerrymandering
In the next post I will explore direct voter suppression.

Mass Incarceration and Felony Disenfranchisement

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed national legal obstacles to universal suffrage.  While the state Jim Crow laws were now no longer formally enforced,  however, their practices often remained.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, legislators found a new way of disenfranchising voters.  Lawmakers—both federal and state—began the process of mass incarceration, aimed disproportionately at people of color.  Between 1972 and 2010, the number of white people incarcerated grew from approximately 150 per 100,000 people in the population to 450 per 100,000, but for people of color the number increased from 500 per 100,000 to 2207 per 100,000.   The rate of black incarceration is thus more than five time the rate of white incarceration even though there is little difference in most crime rates.
After discharge from prison, the ex-offenders’ right to vote varies wildly from state to state.
  1. Two states (Maine and Vermont) actually allow inmates to vote from prison. 
  2. Fourteen states allow parolees to vote immediately upon discharge from prison. 
  3. Twenty-one states prohibit felons from voting until the end of their parole. 
  4. The other states don’t allow voting rights until after the entire sentence is completed and then require additional steps that are different from state-to-state.  Some of these conditions, such as a specific pardon from a governor, make restoration of voting rights highly unlikely … ever.
Since mass incarceration was intended primarily for the poor and especially people of color,  its impact is to disproportionately disenfranchise those same people, who are, not surprisingly, those who would vote primarily Democratic.

Gerrymandering

 
Gerrymandering is a method of drawing state voting districts to disadvantage some class(es) of people, usually members of a certain political party or color.  Although the Supreme Court has declared gerrymandering for racial reasons unconstitutional, in practice it still happens.  However, gerrymandering for political reasons is still considered constitutional.  It works like this:
  • Every ten years the total population of the United States is divided by the number of seats in the House of Representatives to give the approximate number of people that should be in each congressional voting district, currently about 10,000. Districts are allotted to states based on their populations.  States then draw their own district boundaries for their allocation.  The residents of each district will elect one congressperson to the House of Representatives. So far all is fair.
  • But states themselves draw the boundaries for each of their districts and the committees that determine boundaries are generally chosen by the majority party.  With a few exceptions, these committees determine the boundaries to the advantage of their parties, ie gerrymandering.  The following graph from the Washington Post offers a greatly simplified example of the process. 
  • Let’s suppose you have a small state with fifty voters and five districts with ten voters each, four Red (40%) and six Blue (60%).  For simplicity’s sake, imagine that the districts are laid out as below. 

  •     The simplest and fairest way to divide up the state into five district would to divide the voters by rows (see below).  The voters in each district would be completely Blue or Red.  The state would have 2 Red congresspeople and the Blue 3, exactly in proportion to their population.
  • But if the Red controlled the state legislature, they could draw the boundaries as in the middle column where—despite being the minority—they would have 3 (60%) of the districts while the Blue would have only 2 (40%). 
  • Or if the Blue controlled the legislature, they could divide the districts as in the right column giving them all of the districts and the Red none.
  • Put simply, the idea is to pack as many voters from one party into one or two districts so that the other party can easily win the remaining districts.
Maryland’s Third District (in purple) is an extreme example of the extent to which a party will go to gerrymander the districts to their advantage.  In this case, the purple is all one mostly Democratic district.


While Democratic Maryland wins the prize for most bizarre gerrymandering, it’s the Republican gerrymandering that has the greatest impact on partisan voting.  Republicans win the gerrymandering battle by a large margin.  Gerrymandering is perhaps the most powerful method of reducing the impact of any person on an election.

What’s in the Next Post
 
In the next post I’ll look at other forms of overt suppression: voter ID laws, limiting voting times eliminating voting by mail, reducing resources in certain voting districts, and so on.