4 Chapter 4 – WHAT DOES VOTING ACCESS MEAN?

This chapter supports Module 4 in which you will:

• See from the points of view of those who are most directly harmed by racist policies and systems of oppression.

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At the beginning of the course we learned about three different perspectives on voting – voting as a privilege, voting as a right, and voting as a responsibility or obligation. How people define those terms and frame the issue have a lot to do with how access is determined. And, access can mean a lot of different things to different people. To some, access might mean that it is within the realm of possibility that someone could vote — even if it is very difficult. To others, it could mean that voting is convenient and easy to do.

Definitions and framing are important parts of policy analysis.  The History of the Voting Rights Act, the literacy test exercise, ballotpedia, the Civics 101 podcast, and articles in Rao’s collection give us background and things to think about regarding why access needed to be legislated, where things sit now, and what people’s arguments are when it comes to expanding and shrinking access. Pay attention to the arguments for why access is being limited — and then think beyond that to what other outcomes access can impact.

Cheatham, et al report on work done with students around the University of Alabama School of Social Work’s Own Your Vote series. In that series, they educated students about voter suppression and disenfranchisement — issues of access. As the authors say, this is particularly poignant and important in Alabama given that state’s history with suppressing the Black vote.  I’ve read material on this many times, but it is still so shocking and explicit, especially given their ongoing disregard for the Voting Rights Act  and the idea of Black people voting:

Here’s a quote from a piece from the Center for Public Integrity

Alabama’s voter suppression has a long history, rooted in the state constitution. When delegates gathered in 1901 to rewrite the constitution , convention Chairman John Knox opened the proceedings saying their goal was “to establish white supremacy in this state”

At the time, Black residents made up 45% of the state population, and the wealthy white political establishment worried they would join with low-income white residents to dominate state politics.

And this from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

To accomplish this, the delegates adopted a series of voter registration provisions – including a poll tax, a literacy test, property requirements and disqualification for certain criminal convictions – meant to disenfranchise Black people, who made up 45 percent of the state’s population and were threatening the white wealthy class’ political dominance by aligning their votes with poor whites.

Henry Fontaine Reese, a delegate from Selma, summed up the approach: “When you pay $1.50 for a poll tax, in Dallas County, I believe you disenfranchise 10 Negroes. Give us this $1.50 for educational purposes and for the disenfranchisement of a vicious and useless class.”²

And finally from the Equal Justice Initiative:

In 1901, Alabama amended its Constitution to expand disenfranchisement to all crimes involving “moral turpitude” — which applied to misdemeanors and even non-criminal acts — after the president of the constitutional convention argued the state needed to avert the “menace of Negro domination.” Alabama today has one of the nation’s highest disenfranchisement rates: 15 percent of African American adults and nearly a third of African American men in Alabama have lost the right to vote.

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Read

• Cheatham, L., Smith, S., Siler, M., Johnson, K., Turner, C., Wilkes, S., Shah, A., Johnson, L., Swails, P., & Lopaczynski, J. (2021). “Own Your Vote”: A novel approach to teach social workers about voting rights. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348477394_Own_Your_Vote_A_Novel_Approach_to_Teach_Social_Workers_about_Voting_Rights
• VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project. Voting Rights Act of 1965: An Introduction. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/federal/voting-rights-act-of-1965/
• Voting Policies in the United States – https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_policies_in_the_United_States ;
• Two stories from this listing:
  • Rao, A. (Dec 17, 2020). Fight to vote: the most important voting rights stories of the year https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/17/fight-to-vote-newsletter-top-stories-election-2020

 Listen

• Civics 101: Civic Action – Voting, Part 1. https://www.civics101podcast.org/civics-101-episodes/votingpt1

 Do

• Take one (or more) of the voting “literacy” tests found at this website https://archive.org/details/jim-crow-literacy/