Voter-restriction laws favor party, not public
As the pendulum of partisan political power swings from right to left — and back again — through each election cycle, the losing party’s post-loss “autopsy” has become an inevitably routine and increasingly obligatory performance.
This perfectly natural reflex is as much an earnest consideration of the shortcomings of the preceding campaign, as it is a self-preserving assurance to stakeholders that matters are now reliably “under control.”
While such retrospection and restructuring undoubtedly make for good politics, the post-2020 election reflex has brought with it some nefarious underpinnings that appear to cross the line of adept strategy into worrisome, undemocratic territory. Recent proposals signal a Republican Party that aims to better position itself for victory in subsequent elections, not by appealing to broader swaths of the electorate, but by narrowing that electorate in a manner that most favors them. Specifically, measures to reconfigure voting access, like the current bill under consideration in the Florida Legislature, rely on unfounded arguments about voter fraud, while restricting voting access to populations that historically lean Democratic — and perhaps more egregiously, those that have endured a protracted and grim history of voter suppression.
Earlier this month, several of my colleagues in the Florida Senate voted to advance SB 90, legislation that would eliminate secure drop-off boxes for absentee ballots and require already registered voters to re-enroll more frequently for absentee ballots, among other changes. An alarming reverberation of the Georgia Legislature’s recent efforts to limit early voting, and of the Republican Party’s broader reaction to the 2020 presidential and U.S. Senate elections, this bill stands to impede countless American citizens in exercising their lawful right to vote — impacting millions of Florida voters alone in the upcoming gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests.
Should this bill be signed into law (a rather likely outcome) it will augur the latest chapter in a centuries-old tug-ofwar around voter disenfranchisement, particularly for Black communities. This setback comes on the heels of Florida’s 2018 passage of Amendment 4 — widely lauded as a triumphant inflection point for voting rights in Florida, as it provided an avenue for formerly incarcerated Floridians, who’ve paid their literal and figurative dues, to vote. While this ballot amendment granted the franchise to returning citizens of various races, ethnicities, and political stripes, the exclusion it sought to rectify was very much rooted in the systemic ostracization of Black voters.
After the failure of Reconstruction, Southern states imposed harsh legal codes narrowly circumscribing the behavior of Black Americans. Among the laws that either criminalized innocuous behavior or gravely penalized minor trespasses were vagrancy statutes, which made it a crime for African Americans to be unemployed; and “Pig Laws”, which severely and unjustly targeted poor Black people for stealing farm animals.
The criminalization of Black American life began well before the school-to-prison pipeline, the vilification of substance abuse, the over-policing of communities of color, and other contemporary social woes. The ineligibility of such “criminals” to vote has long served to reinforce existing power structures, confining electoral bandwidth and access to populations already favored by those in positions of authority and influence. Increasing access to the ballot box is the surest way to ensure that voters choose their elected representation, not the other way around.
Measures like Florida’s SB 90 and Georgia’s sweeping 2021 voter restrictions constitute a crude and unethical maneuver toward carving an electorate chosen by the elected. These restrictions undermine our democracy by tweaking the parameters of electoral contests in favor of the party who has authored them, rather than in favor of the populace.
The sanctity of free and fair elections was evident to civil rights pioneers like Florida’s own Harry T. Moore, the first NAACP official to be assassinated for his activism. Moore labored diligently throughout the 1940s to register Black voters, but recognized that numbers alone could not restore fairness to tipped scales. He compounded this granular approach with a systemic one, filing lawsuits challenging white primaries that excluded Black and Hispanic Americans from then-dominant Democratic primaries in the South. Although we stand nearly 80 years removed from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned white primaries, and nearly 60 from the Voting Rights Act, we are compelled to revisit and recite the tenebrous sagas that incited them.