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Decades ago, among the most overt privations of Jim Crow, African Americans were telling a joke about a black Harvard professor who moves to the Great South and tries to sign up to vote . A white clerk tells him that he will first have to read a paragraph of the Constitution aloud. When he does it easily, the clerk tells him that he will also have to read and translate a section written in Spanish. Still he conforms. The clerk then asks him to read passages in French, German and Russian, all spoken fluently. Finally, the clerk shows him a passage in Arabic. The teacher looks at him and says, "My Arabic is rusty, but I think it translates to" Negroes can not vote in this country. "
Old jokes have recently regained their importance. Literacy tests, voting taxes, and grandfather clauses, which used to be the most common mechanism to disadvantage minority voters, were recorded in the history books. The race between Republican Brian Kemp, Secretary of State of Georgia, and Democrat Stacey Abrams, former leader of the minority in the House of Representatives of the State – who, if she wins, will be the first governor Black Country – is a virtual tie. But Kemp invoked the so-called exact matching law to suspend fifty-three thousand voter registration applications, for minor offenses such as a missing union trait in a family name. African Americans make up 32% of the state's population, but they account for nearly 70% of suspended claims. Kemp's move is particularly debatable given that Abrams's electoral strategy is based on the mobilization of the six hundred thousand non-status black voters who have long been considered the holy grail of democratic politics in the state.
Kemp's deeds are scrutinized in "One Person, No Vote," a book about modern-day voter repression written by historian Carol Anderson. In 2012, after the Atlanta-based Asian American Legal Advocacy Center discovered that many of its naturalized clients were not registered, although they registered, the group raised the issue with the office. from Kemp. "In a demonstration of gross intimidation," writes Anderson, "Kemp has ordered an investigation into the methods used by the organization to register new voters." In 2014, Kemp investigated the New Georgia Project, a voter registration initiative founded by Abrams. . In the same vein, Jefferson County officials ordered a group of African American seniors to get off a bus to take them to an advance polling site, on the grounds that the transportation , organized by the non-partisan Black Voters Matter group, was a "political activity".
The events in Georgia are part of a larger political project. The xenophobia and resentment elicited by Donald Trump in the 2016 election fundamentally worry the future of the US electorate. (He repeatedly stated that he had lost the popular vote because non-citizens had voted for, because his view that too many immigrants came from "senseless countries" in Africa and the Caribbean was accompanied by a complaint Hillary Clinton Last Thursday at a rally in Montana, he suggested that Democrats be responsible for a caravan of migrants now heading north since the Honduras, because they "think that everyone will vote Democrat." Kemp also claimed that Abrams wanted to let undocumented voters vote in Georgia.The removal of minority votes is the local corollary of this. strategy: an attempt to give a boost to the demographic scale.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ninety-nine bills aimed at reducing voter access were introduced last year in thirty-one state legislatures. Many of the recent Republican-led efforts stem from the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Canada. Holder. In a notice that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that discrimination still existed, but not enough to justify the "extraordinary" remedies imposed by the law on states of the United States. Old Confederation. This argument is roughly equivalent to saying that a decrease in the prevalence of an infectious disease means that we should stop vaccinating against this disease. A few hours after the decision, Texas announced a new strict voter: ID. law. Shortly after, Mississippi and Alabama began enforcing similar laws that had previously been banned.
The decision added a layer of gravity to a crisis of access to voters caused by state laws banning six million Americans with prior convictions from voting. In three states of the South, Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky, this means that at least twenty percent of eligible African-Americans can not vote. At the same time, North Carolina has adopted early voting restrictions, a policy that particularly affects African Americans, who are at high risk of working at the time and can not always go to the polls during the day. of the poll. Last year, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal to reinstate an elector: ID. In North Carolina, a federal court had found black voters targeted "with almost surgical precision." Indeed, Roberts' decision raised the following question: how much discrimination must exist to justify the protection of voters?
Ironically, a number of recent laws support Roberts' argument about the undue burden of voting rights on the South; Complaints have been filed in several states that have fought for the Union, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa, who passed the strict I.D. voter or roll purge laws. Earlier this year, in Kansas, a federal judge overturned a law requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship to register, supported by Kris Kobach, secretary of state, who was vice president of the president short-term voters of Donald Trump. commission against fraud and is currently running for governor. In North Dakota, which became a state only twenty-four years after the American Civil War, Native Americans must now provide an Iranian identity card. which shows a street address – even though many have only one PO box.
The mid-term elections will be held in two weeks. The results will be read as a referendum mainly on the Trump presidency, but also on the effectiveness of the electoral restrictions. The old typing line has changed: a teacher fluent in five languages no longer needs to go to the south to deal with the repression of voters. Elector access is not that a regional crisis; it's a national. ♦
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