58 pages • 1 hour read
Carol AndersonOne Person, No Vote
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Voter ID”
Voter ID laws supposedly combat fraudulent votes from dead citizens, multiple adults in the same household, and vacant lots. While these instances rarely happen, 33 states now have some voter ID law that affects numbers of Americans.
The 2000 election had signs of subterfuge. The St. Louis, Missouri election board illegally purged 50,000 names in Democrat-leaning precincts without alerting those affected, leading to Election Day delays. When Democrats received court approval to extend polling hours, Bush campaign lawyer Mark “Thor” Hearne and Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond convinced the court to reverse the decision. When the state investigated Bond’s claims of impending fraud, it found four malfeasance cases out of 2.3 million voters.
Florida’s governor was George W. Bush’s brother, and the Secretary of State was a co-chair of his state campaign. Using fixers and an allegedly unbiased legal advisor, they raised qualifications for an intended vote, allowed recounts for only broken machines as opposed to malfunctioning machines, shrunk deadlines, and gave preferential guidelines to Republican counties.
Congress launched a bipartisan commission afterward to restore confidence in elections, resulting in the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). While the HAVA enabled operational upgrades, Bond added a “poison pill” recommendation for voter identification rules even though the commission found that 19 million voters nationwide do not have a driver’s license or state-issued voter ID (51).
The act created a false equivalency between voting fraud and voter suppression. From 2005 to 2013, Republicans amplified fears through commissions on electoral integrity. Hearne represented the American Center for Voting Rights at these hearings, which disappeared after its scare stories about majority Black cities gained traction on conservative media. Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft launched an investigation in these cities only to find no malicious cases.
Indiana was one of the first to enact voter ID legislation with Senate Enrolled Act (SEA) 483 in 2006, which required specific government-issued photo IDs for voting, offered free ID cards to low-income residents, and provided provisional guidelines for denied citizens on Election Day. The ACLU, NAACP, and state Democrats sued, arguing that 16% of voter eligible adults lacked qualified IDs and that the state had no problems that justified the law. Yet the Supreme Court sided with the GOP in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, citing voter fraud rhetoric.
Georgia’s H.B. 224 (2005) narrowed ID options to six, ignoring recommended options like utility bills and employer-issued IDs. State Republicans admitted that they did no statistical analysis on the impact on minority voters. The DOJ initially denied VRA clearance due to limitations in DMV office access for Black voters, but a Bush political appointee overruled them the next day.
More than 15 million new voters, primarily people of color and low-income citizens, voted for Barack Obama to become the first African American president in 2008. However, the ongoing Great Recession and a GOP obstruction campaign led to a blowout 2010 midterm election where Republicans picked up six Senate seats, 63 House seats, and control of 26 state legislatures. These gains accelerated voter ID laws with 180 bills in 41 states, many using language from the American Legislative Exchange Council. In addition, 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allowed unlimited corporate funding into political campaigns. Individual politicians claimed that Black people were paid to vote as well as lamented the loss of literacy tests and property requirements.
After the Shelby ruling, Alabama fully enacted a 2011 voter ID law that would have never met preclearance standards. The law did not even accept government-issued public housing IDs, and Governor Robert Bentley closed 31 DMV offices in mostly Black counties that forced them to travel to distant and rarely open locations. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund found that the law affected 100,000 registered voters.
The ID requirements of Texas’s S.B. 14 favored common White documentation, including gun licenses, and imposed felony charges for violations. This law impacts 600,000 registered voters, and some citizens must make an unreimbursed 250-mile trip to the DMV to get a license. The nation’s worst law is in North Carolina, which received condemnation by the federal Fourth Circuit court for its flagrant preferential treatment of White voters.
Turnout gaps between White voters and other demographics are far wider in states with voter ID laws: In Wisconsin, 8.3% of White voters and 27.5% of African American voters were deterred from the 2016 elections due to voter ID issues. Meanwhile, DMV workers did not receive training in new court-ordered requirements, creating confusion and delays.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Anderson begins the chapter with examples of everyday Americans suddenly learning that they cannot vote, such as a recent army veteran and new Wisconsin resident who could not use his Illinois driver’s license to vote. Because he has a full-time job, he cannot travel to a DMV. In this way, Republican lawmakers are now exporting Southern voter suppression tactics up North.
Anderson outlines the “lessons” the Republican Party learns from the 2000 election. First, voter suppression allows them to win elections without changing policies or appealing to other demographics. Second, it is necessary to control election management processes. Third, lying helps with forcing their narrative even when evidence contradicts them. To Anderson, the voter fraud crusade is a manufactured crisis where delivering results is not as important as building a perception of fraud to justify ID laws. She notes how Senator Bond and Bush attorney Hearne used voting fraud to close St. Louis polling places, believing that some votes came from vacant lots. In the ensuing investigation, 82% of the suspected lots were actual residences, including that of St. Louis’s budget manager. However, Bond still had clout to influence the HAVA law, while Hearne posed as an expert to spread conjecture about swing state cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.
Indiana’s SEA 483 highlights how numbers and legislative accommodations can be misleading. Republicans claimed that the new law would only affect 1% of voters, but that amounts to 43,000 citizens—more than enough to affect close races. Meanwhile, the free-ID provision does not work in practice because of bureaucratic delays and loopholes, such as needing a birth certificate to get a driver’s license and a driver’s license to get a birth certificate. Anderson condemns the Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections decision as “judicial legerdemain and sophistry at its worst” (59). The state provided no evidence of voter fraud, while the Supreme Court decision blamed the plaintiffs for using extrarecord studies even though they showed how SEA 483 targeted poor and Black voters.
Swearing to make Obama a one-term president, the Republican Party under Senator Mitch McConnell obstructed the administration and accommodated extreme “Tea Party” conservatives, who Trump also actively appealed to by promoting conspiracies about Obama’s birth certificate. This combined with ongoing economic stagnation for middle-class and low-income citizens and vicious battle to pass healthcare reform contributed to the GOP landslide in the 2010 midterm elections, which would have enormous implications for the decade to come as it placed the authority to redraw state districts in Republican hands (Weeks, Lilton. “10 Takeaways from the 2010 Midterms.” NPR, 3 November 2010).
Anderson explains why voter ID rhetoric is so successful. First, advocates use dog-whistle terms associated with African Americans like “urban,” “crime,” and “stealing.” Second, the ones employing the rhetoric are those in positions of influence: If a congressperson or Supreme Court justice is concerned about voter fraud, then it must be real. Third, the rules seem understandable on the surface. Middle-class people in majority-White neighborhoods have transportation and little issue obtaining a photo ID, so they rarely see the difficulty others have.
This goes together with the closing of and reduction of hours at DMV offices in majority Black counties, a bureaucratic matter that is a new twist on the biased registrar offices under Jim Crow. For example, Governor Bentley claims that Alabama’s DMV closures are for budget reasons, but the savings have a miniscule impact on the state’s debt. Anderson and Obama Attorney General Eric Holder call these measures a new poll tax because many African Americans do not have a car or must miss work to make a visit.
Anderson concludes this chapter by calling the laws a seizure of power not by quality of ideas but by massive disfranchisement that ignores citizens’ “talisman” of humanity (73). She provides more examples of spurned citizens that provides faces to numbers, including a dying woman who wanted to make Hillary Clinton the US’s first woman president. These laws are an obstacle to keep people from fundamental rights of citizenship.
Although the book does not cover the impact of voter suppression on LGBTQ citizens, voter ID laws do impact transgender people. Some state laws require that a person’s documentation matches their birth-assigned gender, and a Williams Institute study found that more than half of 137,000 voter-eligible transgendered people might not have documentation that correctly reflects their gender. LGBTQ people also commonly live in cities, leaving them vulnerable to other voter suppression tactics. (Jagannathan, Meera. “1 in 5 LGBTQ Adults Isn’t Registered to Vote, Despite High 2020 Stakes.” MarketWatch, 5 November 2019).
