In the US, Voting is a Privilege, Not a Right

As US presidential elections approach in the coming weeks, activists and organizers are ringing the alarm bells about the broad practice of voter suppression that still exists in the United States.

On October 19, a group of students and activists at the historically Black institution of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia marched in protest of election measures that they compare to Jim Crow laws that enshrined racist oppression into law for decades in the US South.

A 2021 law, dubbed the Election Integrity Act, has made it illegal in Georgia for anyone to hand out water to those waiting in line to vote—polling lines which can often last for several hours in the Southern heat. At the march this past Saturday, Nicole Carty, the executive director of the youth-led organization Get Free dubbed such measures as “inhumane laws that attempt to suppress the vote for Black and brown people.”

“It is so visibly dehumanizing to actually criminalize such an act of humanity and dignity,” she said, as reported by NBC News. “It really exemplifies the broader inhumanity and inequality of all these voter laws that are happening.”

Mass incarceration and disenfranchisement

The Election Integrity Act is only one example out of many regarding how in the United States, voting is not an accessible right for many working class people. Estimates from 2022 by the Sentencing Project estimate that 4.4 million people in the US, around 2% of the voting-age population, cannot vote due to laws and policies that ban people with felony convictions from voting. These conditions are especially acute in two Southern states, Alabama and Tennessee, where one in thirteen adults cannot vote due to these restrictions.

The US is a country that is notorious for its prison policies that have created conditions of mass incarceration, which disproportionately affect Black and Latino people (people of color account for nearly 7 out of 10 people in US prisons) as well as people impacted by poverty, lack of housing, and lack of access to education. This means that any voting restrictions that target those with felony convictions will primarily disenfranchise the most systematically oppressed groups in the United States, taking the country backward to how it was originally founded: as a state where only white, landowning men had the right to vote.

According to the Sentencing Project, “One in 19 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.5 times that of non-African Americans. Among the adult African American population, 5.3% is disenfranchised compared to 1.5% of the adult non-African American population.”

The falsehood of “election integrity”

The Election Integrity Act is only one part of a wave of anti-voter laws being passed across the country in recent years. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that “states enacted more restrictive laws and more expansive laws in 2023 than in any year in the last decade except for 2021, which was itself an unprecedented year. Early indicators for 2024 suggest more of the same.” Research by the Brennan Center revealed interesting conclusions on how these voter restrictions are linked to racial oppression, finding that lawmakers from whiter districts in more racially diverse states were most likely to sponsor voting restrictions, as compared to lawmakers in less diverse states.

“While the four whitest uncompetitive Republican states (Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, and West Virginia) collectively introduced 28 restrictive provisions in 2021, the four least-white uncompetitive Republican states (Mississippi, Alaska, South Carolina, and Oklahoma) introduced 63 restrictive provisions—more than twice as many,” the Brennan Center reported. “Thus, race seems to be a driving factor for voting rights backlash in Republican-dominated states even when those states aren’t electorally competitive.”

A history of racist voter suppression

The United States, especially in the South, also carries a long history of racist voter suppression, dating back to the moment that Black people were officially permitted to vote in the country. During the Jim Crow era, which spanned from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, white supremacist groups employed violent terrorism to scare Black people away from the polls while lawmakers enacted a barrage of voting restrictions to formally disenfranchise the Black population. Many in the US view the continued existence and resurgence of voting restrictions in the southern part of the country as a continuation of this racist legacy. 

Several popular movements have emerged throughout the country’s history to fight back against racist voter disenfranchisement. Notably, one of the many victories of the Civil Rights movement, which many view as the era which put an end to Jim Crow, was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which sought to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. 

But part of the VRA was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013. In the Shelby v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court ruled to declare a section of the VRA unconstitutional. The VRA required certain states with a history of election discrimination to preclear changes to statewide election laws. While this section of the VRA remained intact after Shelby v. Holder, the section which outlined the formula to select which jurisdictions would be subject to preclearance was eliminated, effectively eliminating the preclearance practice.

In 2022, some congress members attempted to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which would have included a new preclearance formula. However, because Senator Kyrsten Sinema, at the time a Democrat, rejected changes to the Senate filibuster rule, the Act was struck down in the Senate. 

After Shelby vs. Holder, the voting gap between Black and white voters, (the difference in voter turnout between the two groups) only increased. This contrasts with 2012, when Black voters had voted in higher percentages than white voters for the first time on record. By 2020, Black voters had voted less than white voters by 8.6 percentage points.

The “purging” of votes

Ahead of the November elections, Republicans have launched a legal strategy to purge the voter roles of several states that could be key in deciding which candidate ultimately takes the presidency. As of October 22, at least three dozen cases are pending across 19 states relating to voter rolls. These lawsuits seek to limit, not expand, the numbers of voters who are registered to vote, and are largely based on conservative claims that large numbers of undocumented (so-called “illegal”) immigrants are voting. However, the current voter registration system in the US is set up in a way that makes non-citizen voting difficult enough to be a nonissue.

A federal judge recently blocked Alabama’s purge of the state’s voter rolls. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen had announced in August that he would be removing several thousand registered voters from voter rolls due to claims that these were non-citizen voters. Republicans in North Carolina attempted to remove nearly a quarter of a million voters from voter rolls, but this attempt was shot down by a federal judge last week. 

No third option

Peoples Dispatch interviewed Claudia De la Cruz, a socialist candidate running against both Trump and Harris, who as a third party candidate has faced her own challenges in running for office outside the two-party duopoly. De la Cruz directly referenced this attempt at voter purging in North Carolina. “It’s important for us to understand just how undemocratic this system is,” she said. 

“We’ve received a lot of attacks from both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Democrats [are] attacking [us] even more,” she said, referring to the successful attempts by the Democratic Party to get De la Cruz’s name off the ballot in key election battleground states such as Pennsylvania. “We know that they are attacking third party candidates, and I would say even explicitly a socialist candidate, because people are tired and people are exhausted. And when people are tired and exhausted, they look for another alternative. They look for other options.”

“The real problem here is that you have one party with two names, and both of these sections of the ruling class are gaslighting, blackmailing and bribing our people into believing that they have to vote against their interests, against their values, and against what they understand to be their principles,” De la Cruz said.