Blocking
the ballots
TRUMP HAS TURNED TO THE AGE-OLD
PRACTICE OF SUPPRESSING THE BLACK VOTE
By Justin Worland
The ouTrage and condemnaTion came fasT in
September when President Donald Trump encour-
aged his supporters to commit voter fraud. “Let them
send [a mail-in ballot] in, and let them go vote,” Trump
said in Wilmington, N.C., urging backers to test the
mechanics of North Carolina’s system by voting twice.
A U.S. President encouraging citizens to commit a
felony is alarming enough, but in the next breath,
Trump acknowledged intentions that were arguably
more pernicious: he said Republicans in the state
would also fight in court to halt “unsolicited votes.”
“Unsolicited votes” indeed. Trump has a tendency
to say the quiet part out loud, but in Wilmington, he
was practically shouting that not all votes are created
equal. And in North Carolina in particular, that means
one thing: suppress Black voters. This election cycle,
Trump allies have gone to court to defend a restric-
tive voter-ID law and to make it more difcult for
voters to correct mistakes on mail-in ballots. Those
measures have been shown to disproportionately af-
fect Black voters.
However appalling, this shouldn’t come as a great
surprise. After Black people were brought to the New
World as slaves, Black disenfranchisement was overt
and uncontroversial. Over the centuries, despite con-
stitutional amendments and landmark legislation,
it’s a history the country can’t shake. The past de-
cade has brought a resurgence of the practice, fu-
eled by a Supreme Court decision and a President
who thrives on racial division. And so today, amid
a national reckoning about racial injustice, Trump’s
re-election may hinge on the success of his efforts to
suppress the voices of Black voters.
In June 2013, the Supreme Court overturned key
provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, declaring
that measures in question were meant to address
“decades-old problems” and that the Constitution was
“not designed to punish for the past.” Within hours,
North Carolina GOP ofcials touted plans for a new
law to curtail early voting, require ID at polling places
and end same-day voter registration—all policies
they understood would impact Black voters. A court
said in 2016 the effort to suppress the state’s Black
vote was carried out with “almost surgical precision.”
Over the past four years, such measures have be-
come central tactics for Trump allies in the strategi-
cally critical state. As North Carolina experiences a
surge in voting by mail, Republicans have gone to
court to make it easier to reject mailed ballots on
technicalities. Already, election ofcials have con-
tested some 6,800 votes—a number bound to grow
as more people vote. The state is about 20% Black;
40% of the contested ballots come from Black voters.
Maneuvers like these could be key to a Trump vic-
tory across the country, voting-rights advocates say.
Black Americans are less likely to have the identifica-
tion required by the wave of voter-ID laws enacted
by Republican legislatures in the past decade. Pre-
dominantly Black neighborhoods are more likely to
face long lines on Election Day. Republican- aligned
groups have spread misinformation to discourage
Black voters, like the claim that early-voting data
would be used for debt collection. The list goes on.
Efforts to suppress the Black vote may be front
and center in 2020, but they’re nothing new. After
the Civil War, the 15th Amendment banned racial
voting restrictions but left states free to bar Black
voters on other grounds. The Jim Crow era brought
a maze of laws in the South designed to do just that.
The Voting Rights Act was supposed to end these
discriminatory practices. For a time, the tide seemed
to be turning, but today that progress is slipping away.
There’s more at stake in this election than whether
this regression helps deliver a win to Trump. Racial
voter suppression, once primarily a regional blight,
has “metastasized across the country,” says Sherrilyn
Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund. “On the table will be whether this
is in fact a sound democracy.” □1965: AP; KENTUCKY: JON CHERRY—GETTY IMAGES
^
African
Americans line
up to cast ballots
in 1965 after the
passage of the
Voting Rights Act