Redefining Disenfranchisement (op-ed)

In 2012 the NAACP appeared before the United Nations Human Rights Council to prove voter identification laws enacted by some U.S. states violated the human rights of minorities by disenfranchising voters. But Saudi Arabia sat on the human rights council who didn’t allow women to vote. I wondered if the Saudis thought the NAACP was redefining disenfranchisement.

Recently Alabama state officials announced it was closing thirty-one satellite driver license offices due to budget cuts. The state officials closed these specific offices because “the combined effort of the 31 part-time satellite locations … accounted for less than five percent of all the Alabama driver license transactions.”

This fiscal decision was criticized by civil rights advocates because in 2011 the state of Alabama required voters to have photo IDs as of 2014. (The state’s reason for the requirement was to prevent voter fraud and the stated issued free voter ID cards.) And the office closings took place in rural predominately black areas.

This prompted one columnist to point out, “According to the Alabama secretary of state, about 500,000 state residents in 2014 didn’t have photo IDs (That’s 20 percent of those registered to vote.) The law disproportionately affects poor people who find it the most difficult to get a photo ID and, in particular African Americans, who voted in fewer numbers in 2014 in places where voter ID laws went into effect.” (This ignores the fact that residents were informed two years in advance of the requirement and that non-presidential elections always have low voter turn out rates.)

And the closing prompted Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton to proclaim the action of the Republican ran state was “a blast from the Jim Crow past.”

Really?

In 1871 Georgia started the poll tax; it was made cumulative in 1877 (requiring citizens to pay all back tax before being permitted to vote). By 1904 every former confederate state had a poll tax. Its sole purpose was to disenfranchise. No state prosecuted any person for the failure to pay the poll tax.

In 1890 southern states began literacy test to disenfranchise voters, 40-60% of blacks were illiterate compared to 8-18% of whites.

And Alabama’s constitution of 1901 contained multiple measures to disenfranchise, but Jackson Giles, a black janitor, managed to qualify to vote despite the constitutional restrictions. Giles brought a suit against Alabama on behalf of himself and 75,000 other qualified blacks who had been arbitrarily denied the right to register. But in Giles v. Harris the Supreme Court rejected Giles’s claim. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated: If the Alabama constitution violated the fifteenth amendment’s guarantee against voting discrimination, then it [Alabama’s constitution] is void and Giles can not be legally registered to vote.

This was the past Hillary Clinton suggested is comparable to current budget cuts in Alabama. This also implies that the plight of Jackson Giles (who had to prove he could read and pay a poll tax) is synonymous with a person that doesn’t feel like getting a photo ID.

There seems to be a disparate attempt to redefine disenfranchisement to mean: Voter inconvenience. The NAACP promoted voter inconvenience at the United Nations (who has no legal authority in the United States) to justify the group’s existence in this millennium, and Hillary Clinton promoted voter inconvenience to prove Jim Crow still exists and democratic identity politics matters. (Also proving she’s a twentieth century politician.)

The governor of Alabama stated, “To suggest the closure of the driver’s license offices is a racial issue is simply not true, and to suggest otherwise should be considered an effort to promote a political agenda.”

After weeks of criticism the governor decided to leave the facilities open once a month to serve residents. The governor realized Hillary Clinton’s statement wasn’t referring to anything in the past. He interpreted her statement to mean, “Jim Crow now! Jim Crow tomorrow! Jim Crow forever!”

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 10/28/15