UNT Dallas Library: Racism &amp; Social Injustice: Elections &amp; Voter Suppression

Terminology

Felon Disenfranchisement
Federal and state laws impose civil restrictions on persons convicted of felony crimes. In 2016, an estimated 6.1 million U.S. residents were denied the right to vote as a result of having been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for more than one year in the United States.
Gerrymandering
The United States has a long history of gerrymandering, or the manipulation of political district borders to give one group a political advantage over another. The term "gerrymandering" itself was coined in the US in 1812, although the phenomenon existed even earlier. Political districts, or administrative divisions of voters, are important to democratic governments because they impact the way citizens are represented by elected officials. In gerrymandering, officials skew district borders to secure more favorable voters for themselves or their party, or to sabotage the prospects of political opponents. Gerrymandering is often viewed negatively and has been hotly debated, but is usually legal in the United States. Only certain forms of gerrymandering based on reducing the voting power of minority citizens have been declared illegal.
Jim Crow Laws
Discriminatory laws designed to disfranchise and segregate African Americans in the South
Shelby County v. Holder
In a 5–4 decision, the United States Supreme Court determined that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. This decision stated that the Act placed burdens on states that did not take into account current voting conditions.
Voter Suppression
Voter suppression refers to practices designed to interfere in election outcomes by dissuading or preventing specific populations of voting-age adults from voting. Historically, voter suppression has often attempted to reduce or eliminate the number of voters that intend to vote against a candidate or political measure that the suppressor hopes will succeed. Voter suppression tactics range from small inconveniences such as making the act of voting difficult to a specific voting group to actual acts of aggression against the targeted voting population. Voter suppression efforts have varied over time and are often specific to various state and local governments. Most of these tactics are illegal, but many nonviolent tactics remain legal in the United States.
Voting Fraud
Use of illegal tactics and practices to influence political elections in US history.
Voting Rights Act of 1965
Statute permitting the federal government to expand its power and authority in order to increase black voter registration and participation in states where African Americans had been subject to discrimination.

Scholarly Articles from Annual Reviews Database

Buying, Expropriating and Selling Votes In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different forms. In this review, we discuss recent findings explaining variation in the mix of clientelistic strategies across countries, regions, and individuals and identify a few areas for future progress, particularly in explaining variation in targeting of inducements by politicians on different types of voters.
Complicit States and the Governing Strategy of Privilege Violence: When Weakness is not the Problem This article seeks to explain why some high-capacity democracies have high levels of internal violence. These regimes present a puzzle: Why are bureaucratically capable states that ostensibly answer to voters failing to provide security? Challenging the “weak states” paradigm, we argue that states with high capacity and significant violence within marginalized populations exhibit a governance pattern in which governing factions deliberately weaken security services and collude with nonstate violent actors to maintain power and ensure extreme levels of privilege and impunity. Although these states do not feature ideal-type institutions, they are not weak. Instead, economic and political elites are complicit in enforcing a system of material inequality and uneven democratic incorporation maintained by violence. As politicized security agencies become incapacitated and repressive, citizens turn to nonstate security providers for protection, from private firms to criminals and insurgents, increasing social violence and obscuring the state origins of what we term privilege violence.
Disenfranchisement: Historical Underpinnings and Contemporary Manifestations For racial and ethnic minorities, voting is equated with citizenship and decision-making power. However, despite proclamations of freedom, justice, and equality, state legislatures across the country have enacted disenfranchisement laws to marginalize the voice of those deemed as "the other." Using the social construction of target populations and critical race theory as the theoretical framework, this study analyzes state legislative trends to explain and underscore the implications of policies designed to impose a specific effect on target populations. This article argues that disenfranchisement becomes apparent through the implementation of colorblind policies that impose a financial hardship, create confusion, limits access to the ballot, dilute the vote geographically, or use subjective measures of eligibility. The result is a disproportionate effect on racial and ethnic minorities that prevents full access to the rights and privileges associated with being an American citizen.
Felon Disenfranchisement Crime control and prisons have featured prominently in electoral campaigns, yet currently and formerly incarcerated people are a profoundly disenfranchised constituency in the United States. This article examines the extent to which this population and its concerns have been excluded from American electoral politics. Starting with the philosophical debate on the extent of the right to vote, the article examines the scope of felon disenfranchisement in the United States, including comparative perspectives, policies in states that allow voting within prisons, and eligibility to run for office with a criminal record. The article also examines the problematic underlying issue of racial exclusion via felon disenfranchisement; the impact of disenfranchisement on civic engagement and recidivism; and the perspectives of disenfranchised, formerly incarcerated people. The article ends with thoughts on the prospects of bipartisan reform of voting rights.
Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States This article analyzes voter identification laws in the United States and their effects on voter turnout. Theoretically, there are plausible reasons to hypothesize turnout lowering effects, though there are also reasons to hypothesize those effects might be minimal. Methodologically, there are research design hurdles to clear in order to produce effect estimates that may be attributed to voter identification laws. Empirically, a small number of studies have employed suitable research designs and generally find modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws. This may indicate that voter identification laws have only minor effects on turnout, or it may be due to the fact that the type of voter identification law that may have the most significant effects—a strict photo identification law—is a relatively recent phenomenon. Future elections and the related additional data may make it possible to adjudicate among these possibilities.

Podcasts

10 Voter Suppression Methods - Stuff You Should Know
Voter suppression in the USA is as old as voting itself. Listen in to hear about 10 ways we stifle the vote.
How safe is your right to vote? - ABA Journal
The Constitution of the United States has been amended multiple times since it was written to expand the franchise of voting from the original beneficiaries, white male landowners. But the story of voting rights in the United States is not just one of expansion; there have been periods (such as after Reconstruction) where voting rights that had once been exercised were blocked off, extinguished and suppressed.
The Racist Reality of Voter Suppression - ACLU
Professor Carol Anderson (Emory University) joins At Liberty to discuss ongoing voter suppression efforts in the United States, and as a bonus, she tells the story of how the NAACP helped lead the global struggle against colonialism in the 1940s and 1950s.
Who Is Voter Suppression? - Who Is?
In the United States, political power is allocated when Americans go to the polls and vote for the candidates whom they believe will best represent their interests in government. For that reason, access to the ballot has been restricted--and contested--since the early days of democracy, with each expansion of the electorate met by measures to suppress the vote. Democracy, it seems, has always been for some, but not others. On this episode of “Who Is?,” join Sean Morrow for a conversation on voter suppression in the aftermath of Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and upended how Americans vote. Featuring three women who fight for voting rights nationwide: Stacey Abrams, Lydia Camarillo, and Natalie Landreth.
Why Voter Suppression Continues and How the Pandemic Has Made It Worse - America Interrupted (PBS News Hour)
The disenfranchisement of voters has been a part of America’s history for as long as it’s held elections, and this year is no different. A look at the history of voter suppression and what it looks like in a pandemic.

The History of Voting Rights from 1965 to Now - ACLU
Suppressed: The Fight To Vote
In 2018 Brian Kemp successfully suppressed hundreds of thousands of votes to become the governor of Georgia, beating out Stacey Abrams. Suppressed: The #FightToVote uncovers the insidious voter suppression tactics Kemp and politicians all across the country use to stay in power.

Answering the Call - The American Struggle for the Right to Vote
The bloody attacks of protestors in Selma in 1965 led to the historic protection of all Americans' right to vote. The film explores a cherished family story of Selma and the current state of voter suppression in America.
Dark Money - The Influence of Corporate Money in our Elections
This acclaimed documentary examines one of the greatest present threats to American democracy: the influence of untraceable corporate money on our elections and elected officials. The film takes viewers to Montana -a frontline in the fight to preserve fair elections nationwide - to follow a local journalist working to expose the real-life impacts of the US Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.
Free for All - One Man's Quest to Save Democracy
As Ohio goes, so goes the nation. FREE FOR ALL features filmmaker John Wellington Ennis--a disillusioned American--in Ohio with a business suit, sense of humor, faded ideals and a camera. The film explores recent evidence of election fraud happening in the U.S. since 2000, when thousands of black Democratic voters were disenfranchised in Florida. Ennis notices the pattern reoccurring again in the 2004 Election and decides he "can't just be some dude shaking his head anymore." He grabs his camera and goes on a mission to find answers in the swing state of Ohio during the 2006 election. This film uncovers evidence of a variety of schemes to swing our elections--rampant corruption, conspiracies to block millions of voters, privatized elections run by biased officials, misinformation, "caging," voter I.D. obstacles, malfunctioning voting machines, legislated voter suppression, polling place confusion, and more.
The New Deciders
Learn how Asian American, Black Millennial, Arab American and Latino Evangelical voters are exerting their growing strength and influence in this 2016 election special about power and politics, demographics and democracy.
Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook
Narrated by Jeffrey Wright, Rigged chronicles how our right to vote is being undercut by a decade of dirty tricks - including the partisan use of gerrymandering and voter purges, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The film captures real-time voter purges in North Carolina and voter intimidation in Texas.
Voting Matters - Fighting for Voter Rights
When a key section of the Voting Rights Act was struck down in 2013, several states with a history of racial discrimination immediately attempted to pass laws that further restricted voter rights. This came in the form of limiting the window for voter registration, purging voters with inactive histories and requiring more restrictive forms of ID. There are currently 23 states with such voter restrictions. This film follows civil rights attorney Donita Judge as she helps several voters in Ohio cast ballots even though they initially were turned away.

Racism & Social Injustice: Elections & Voter Suppression

Terminology

Scholarly Articles from Annual Reviews Database

Podcasts

Videos

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