I’m fuming and fatigued about the doomed battle over voting rights legislation. Mad that, in 2022, there is still a need for laws to protect American citizens’ right to vote and tired of having to talk about why the protection is vitally important.
My frustration was built over the last few months as the public discussion about the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act intensified — and devolved into a story about petty posturing and political gamesmanship. During the last weeks leading to the vote on those two bills, the story was posited as merely a defeat for President Joe Biden, and a win for those who oppose his agenda.
Politics was, of course, part of the issue, but the win/lose scenario is an oversimplified explanation of what’s really at stake — an attack on democracy — and a deliberate distortion of the impact of the original Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 1965 bill criminalized certain states’ overt tactics to block African Americans’ efforts to register to vote. Before the law, African Americans were required to pay poll taxes, to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar, to recite perfectly The Bill of Rights or whatever other document which suited the election clerk. If that harassment didn’t discourage would-be registrants from trying to register at the courthouse, then Ku Klux Klan members would go to their homes, burn crosses and terrorize them with vicious beatings.
Taken as a whole, those tactics worked, dramatically reducing the number of African American voters. Numbers that skyrocketed when those barriers became federally illegal. Despite the vocal racist opposition of the senators known as the Southern strategists, the 1965 bill passed with support from both parties and was renewed by members of both parties several times.
But in 2022, the Trumpification of the Republican party has meant that all of the Republican senators — even some who voted for it in the past — chose to block the federal legislation and to support the nakedly biased state election bills. Of the 19 new state laws already in place, parts of Georgia’s stand out — one which allows local voting officials to override the results of elections, and another, the inhumane restriction which makes it illegal to bring water to voters waiting in line.
I wish I could dismiss the hypocrisy and the self-righteous pomposity of the opponents of the voting rights bills, including the two Democrat obstructionists. Republicans who claim to want “free and fair elections” are either silent or eagerly supportive of former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, a strategy based on his legal challenges to losses in communities of color. To be clear, he also lost in predominantly white communities but did not protest those results.
Voting rights are the foundation of every citizenship right. Black Americans and the many other groups who have been safeguarded by the original legislation stand to lose their voice at the ballot box. Social justice activists know that freedom costs. Some of them paid the ultimate price to make the 1965 law a reality. And the rest of us continue to pay as targets of election disinformation and state-sponsored voter suppression.
Even before the Senate voted down the voting rights bills and the rule changes that could have made passing them possible, President Biden pledged to push new voting legislation. But, in the end, it will be the persistence of the activists on the ground to lead that fight — once again.
