One Person, No Vote

“The disappearing minority voter is the campaign’s most misunderstood story. One Person, No Vote seeks to change that. Minority voters did not just refuse to show up; Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls. Pushed by both the impending demographic collapse of the Republican Party, whose overwhelmingly white constituency is becoming an even smaller share of the electorate, and the GOP’s extremist inability to craft policies that speak to an increasingly diverse nation, the Republicans opted to disfranchise rather than reform.” 

Anderson might introduce the question of low turnout by people of color in the 2016 election as “a mystery worthy of Raymond Chandler” (1), but she is explicit in the book’s thesis. In this passage, she identifies the Republican Party as the culprit and its desire to maintain power without changing its platform to broaden its appeal as the motive. Anderson then covers how its legislative tactics mirror past voter suppression efforts and its tendency to play ignorant when people call them out.

“SECTION 260: The income arising from the sixteenth section trust fund, the surplus revenue fund, until it is called by the United States government, together with a special annual tax of thirty cents on each hundred dollars of taxable property in this state, which the legislature shall levy, […] and provided further, that nothing herein contained shall prevent the legislature from first providing for the payment of the bonded indebtedness of the state and the interest thereon out of all the revenue of the state.” 

Anderson includes a single unbroken sentence from the Mississippi constitution to demonstrate the disingenuousness of the literacy test. Senator Theodore Bilbo bragged about how most White people and no Black people could read this verbose document, and the state underfunded schools to ensure an ignorant populace. While White applicants usually receive easier passages, officials weren’t worried if these tests eliminated them either.

“Alabama civil rights attorney Hank Sanders recognized the revolutionary, transformative impact that the preclearance provision could have. Section 5 of the VRA, he explained, ‘can complete something this country started 200 years ago. That something is not complete, it is called Democracy.’” 

Anderson stresses the importance of litigation in securing civil rights and eliminating barriers like the White primary. However, this is a long process fraught with setbacks. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act forces jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain approval for voting laws before their enactment—the strictest measure since Reconstruction.