Opinion| Voter Suppression Tactics

Writer: Frederick Nickens

Community,

It would seem that many amongst us are trying to revive old play books when it comes to voter suppression tactics. Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation's registration rolls ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election. 

As Sen. Raphael Warnock stated “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve ever seen since the Jim Crow Era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.”

Since the 2020 Presidential Election lawmakers in 47 states have introduced more than 360 bills with provisions that restrict voting access. Here in Texas, Senate Bill 1 has a voter purge provision that increases the frequency of purges and requires the removal of voters thought to be noncitizens without notice and imposes penalties on election officials if they don’t comply. 

One of the main drivers of these challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices. 

About a dozen people in Denton County have submitted what has sometimes surpassed 1,000 challenges a day. But True the Vote is not the only group in this fight. Some others have come up with very clever names such as  Soles to the Rolls in Michigan, whose name echoes the Souls to the Polls get-out-the-vote efforts of Black churches, and Nevada’s Pigpen Project are among state-level initiatives in which volunteers are trying to find flaws in state voter rolls.

To truly understand why these groups are conducting these attacks we have to go back to the beginning. They are not original. They are using history as their guide. On December 3, 1867 Democratic President Andrew Johnson gave his annual message to Congress. In his message, Johnson said that “Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”

On September 28, 1868 the Opelousas Massacre began. Over the course of about two weeks, White men in Opelousas, a city in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, and killed around 250 people, mostly Black Americans. The goal was to suppress turnout among Black voters earlier that year, Louisiana voters had ratified a state constitution that enfranchised Black men. Then on April 13, 1873 Colfax Massacre. A mob of about 150 armed White men in Colfax, the seat of Grant Parish, Louisiana, killed between 60 and 150 Black Americans.

On August 12, 1890, Mississippi constitutional convention began Delegates convened to rewrite Mississippi’s constitution inorder to skirt the 15th Amendment and functionally disenfranchise Black voters. Adopted on November 1, the constitution achieved the delegates’ chief aim through instituting mechanisms including poll taxes and literacy tests.

Democrat James K. Vardaman, who would go on to become governor and a US Senator, Stated that “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n****r from politics.” November 10, 1898 Wilmington Massacre. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a White mob ejected a legitimately elected biracial government and installed White a supremacists. Alfred Waddell, the mob’s leader, said, “We will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.” Then there is March 7, 1965 the day known as “Bloody Sunday” Which brings us to June 25, 2013 the Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Although they have not used direct physical violence against Black people to suppress the vote in decades, please do not underestimate them.

If VP Kamala Harris is successful in winning the election the courts will not be the only recourse for these people. They will become desperate, that means we have to be prepared for everything that may come our way. The cure is to vote for candidates who will fight to get the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act passed. 

I will end with this, In the words of MLK Jr. “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” We must love ourselves more than the haters want us to hate ourselves. Take care and may God Bless all of you and your families.