Today, I want to look at Alabama. That state had full Democrat control up through 1986, and only in 1996 did that state’s Democratic Party remove the racist rooster symbol. It didn’t have full Republican control of all major state offices until 2010… but that doesn’t mean the Alabama Democrats were pushing a progressive agenda up until 2010.

The key was George Wallace’s control of the party up until the end of his last governor’s term in 1986. Even when the national party structure pressed Alabama’s state party to become desegregationist, Wallace kept it in that camp. Alabama has had a history of being one of the toughest states to both successfully register to vote and then to actually use that vote. From 1969 to 2013, over 100 proposed changes to Alabama voting law were challenged over violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But in 2013, the Roberts Supreme Court heard Shelby County v Holder and made a ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The VRA required states with a history of voter discrimination to pre-clear any changes in voting law with the federal government. The Shelby County ruling dismantled that preclearance provision. Since 2013, Alabama has introduced measures that absolutely target Black voters, even though it’s possible to make pie-in-the-sky comments about the possible virtues of such measures. The impact of stronger voter ID laws, closure of drivers’s license offices in predominantly Black counties, requiring proof of citizenship to vote, closure of polling places, voter purge measures, and making an unpublicized change to the felony disenfranchisement law all combine to apply massive pressures on Black voters in Alabama. These measures both raise barriers to registration along with nullifying those very registrations through underhanded means.

In short, when the politicians of Alabama could no longer deny the vote to Blacks over poll taxes and literacy tests, they came up with new methods to deny those voters their rights. When the pressure from the national Democratic Party became too strong for the segregationists in the Alabama Democrats to resist, they joined the Republican Party and carried on with their work to further segregationism. Wallace’s famous quote, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” is still their byword. Although Wallace declined to align with any party in his later years, his son switched to the Republican Party in 1992.

Please note that while it was Democrat politicians that put the structure of Jim Crow into place, it is the Alabama Republican Party that is fighting to keep it in place. Because of the challenge in the Shelby County case, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is essentially shelved for the whole of the South. Just as the Republicans made the Corrupt Bargain of 1877 to receive national power at the cost of civil rights for Blacks, the Shelby County ruling was a gift from the Republican-majority Supreme Court to the segregationists not just in the South, but in the nation as a whole. In exchange for gifts like that, white supremacists have a vested interest in preserving Republican power. Because the Republican Party has either failed or struggled to get a majority of the popular vote in the last 3 presidential elections, it *needs* those white supremacists, both their votes and their tactics, in order to hold that power.

The lack of pre-clearance means that restrictive voting measures can be put into place and then inflict their effects on minority voters as the court challenges continue. Having pre-clearance meant that minority voters could continue to cast votes as court challenges over proposed laws proceeded apace. Moreover, states with a history of voter suppression may now continue that history without any regard for legal impact.

So let’s go through that history…

The 1901 Alabama law that included a long list of offences that stripped a voter for life included pretty much all felonies, but also crimes involving “moral turpitude” and then left that term undefined. Basically, an undefined term means just about anything can be made to match that requirement – so people guilty of being in an interracial relationship could be stripped of their votes for life. That law was challenged in 1980 by two potential voters – excluded because they had misdemeanor convictions for bouncing checks – and the Rehnquist Court upheld the challenge, noting that the law was targeting Blacks.

In 1996, Alabama changed its law and re-introduced that vague term. Because of that, and that it has been inconsistently applied to be disproportional in its effects on Black voters, 7% of Alabama’s voting age population can’t vote. That translates to 15% of all the Black voters in the state. Even though Alabama passed a law in 2017 to define “moral turpitude” – because of yet another court challenge – the Alabama Secretary of State so far has not taken steps to notify people affected by that change.

Combined with a history of discriminatory law enforcement, laws that disenfranchise as a result of contact with a racially-biased justice system are in no way race-neutral in their intent or application. Add to it a complicated system that requires a person to petition to be reinstated to vote under the 2017 law, and you have a situation where a normal person living paycheck to paycheck is not going to be able to afford the legal advice necessary to navigate the process. What do you put down as the offense you were convicted of if you have to be specific as to the degree? What if the offense definition/title has changed in its legal definition since you were convicted? What do you do when there’s a clerical error in processing the reinstatement? When other states restore the right to vote automatically, Alabama’s maintenance of a law that keeps Blacks from voting is definitely part of fulfilling Wallace’s declaration.

Alabama also has vague laws on how polling places operate, with further vagueness about training and supervising election officials, which allows for various officials to easily dodge responsibility when things go wrong – so that means things can and will go wrong without punishment, like when a registrar in Russell County in 2019 told people it was OK to register using a business address. Alabama got sued in 2012 for failure to provide ballots to overseas residents – a violation of the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. In that case, the state argued that it was a *county* responsibility to get those ballots out… but there are different processes for handling elections in each of Alabama’s 67 counties, so would that argument really be the best one to make?

And if you want to look at public records of voting in Alabama, good luck with that. Its Open Records Act is one of the most tightly written in all the Deep South states – Alabama wants to keep its public matters secret, it seems. And, yes, this all has a Democratic legacy, but remember that those segregationists are now registered as Republicans, by and large, and it’s the current Republican administration that’s holding the line on segregation forever. If a public official fails to hand over a record as required by law, the challenger must then sue and bear the costs of the court in the process. Alabama also has fewer public meetings than other states, so those minutes and records from the board of elections are non-existent as public records go. And because one of those public records is the State Voter File, this is a big deal.

One needs that State Voter File to check against discrimination. In Georgia, it can be had for $250. In North Carolina, it is free. In Alabama, it costs $35,008.94 for a printed copy and a digital copy costs 2.5% more. Alabama charges by the name, hence the cost. Arizona used to do the same thing, but changed after a court challenge. Alabama is not so easily swayed: it will make access to that file as close to impossible as it can, so that it can preserve a segregationist set of policies.

Alabama also violates the 1993 National Voter Registration Act by purging voters that do not respond to postcards, which I detailed in Part 1 when I discussed Georgia. That the purges meant that US Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) was unable to vote for himself pales against the majority of the other nearly 70,000 voters purged – mostly Black.

A note about these postcards that I hadn’t mentioned before – a simple clerical error like leaving a “North” or a “Road” off an address can result in a non-delivery status that leads to a voter being purged. Leaving off an apartment number can have similar drastic effects, and you’ll never guess what racial group *that* hits disproportionately.

Even though a comprehensive study of in-person voting of 1 billion votes cast in the USA from 2000 to 2014 only found 31 credible instances of voter fraud, Alabama joins in with the rest of the Republican Party in clamoring that voter fraud is a major issue to protect ourselves against – and that protection involves measures that effectively disenfranchise Black voters. That voter fraud rate is one case of fraud for every 34 million votes cast, which would mean, at most, 4 cases in the 2016 election. Compared to Republican voter suppression efforts, that is hardly a focus worth having.

Why promote a fear of in-person fraud? It’s to generate support for segregationist voter suppression laws. Plain and simple. This fear of the Black vote is widespread in the Republican Party: when Republican governor of Florida Charlie Crist extended early voting hours in 2008, Republicans flat-out told him that he had handed over the state to Barack Obama. After Crist left office, the following Republican governor rolled back the early voting law. A 2016 North Carolina law was shot down because it would “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Again, it was Republicans behind *that* measure.

Alabama’s laws for reporting voter fraud do not require any proof on the part of the accuser. The accuser doesn’t even have to self-identify. Of the 928 submissions of voter fraud accusations – which, unlike voter registration, can be done online and easily – only 6 resulted in fraud convictions. This led to two elections being overturned – and if we recall how the Alabama Secretary of State doesn’t properly train county elections officials, this should be no surprise that there were problems. And yet, the 6 cases of fraud and two small-town elections are used as justification for laws that target Blacks in Alabama.

The elections in question were the Brighton Mayor election, with the election changing from 376 to 330 to 330 votes each for the candidates, resulting in a runoff. Next was the Gordon Mayor election – the mayor there had illegally notarized two of the absentee ballots. That was two of the fraud convictions and the mayor was removed from office after being convicted. This Gordon election was originally cited as a third election overturned due to voter fraud, but the overturning was due to the fraud conviction itself, not because the outcome was changed. The second overturning that still counted was the Wetumpka city council election: the 168-165 result became 165-160 after 8 absentee ballots were thrown out.

A note on absentee ballots – they are very easy to throw out for governments that want to suppress voters, so more on that in a later essay, no doubt.

But, yes, Alabama has a deep-rooted history of suppressing Black votes, and it is the state’s Republican Party doing the most to preserve George Wallace’s “segregation forever” vision.

I’m starting a series in which I focus on voter suppression in the USA. I want to focus on actual registration for elective offices and not primary elections. I will preface my comments by saying that both parties have a need to clean up their primary and caucus rules to open up those processes to additional voters. Closed primaries and selective invites are on the wrong side of history – it’s time to open things up. It’s also time to consolidate elections. Voting outside the federal election cycle – that big day in November – depresses voter turnout and typically benefits an interest group’s interests at the cost of hearing a fuller response to the measure on the ballot. As much as I may sympathize with an interest group that benefits from low voter turnout, I would rather see high turnout and that interest group find a way to inspire more people to vote for it than just its core consittuency.

That being said, I want to talk about voter suppression as part of a national or state party move to retain power by preventing opposition voters from being able to vote.

I start at the Democratic Party. Searching for Democratic Party voter suppression turned up the above criticisms of closed primaries in some states and off-cycle elections and how some Democratic Party-allied interest groups support them. I did not find any recent articles on statewide or national efforts to suppress or turn away voters. I did find an article on a recent case in Georgia about the removal of over 500,000 voters from the rolls in that state and how it was based on a law passed by Democrats.

Now, to read about that case at the webpage of the Georgia Secretary of State, there is zero context on *when* the Democrats passed that law. Neither is there any context on how long Republicans have been in power and themselves made no effort to remove the law. The National Review article criticizing the Democrats’ challenge to the voter suppression in Georgia pointed out that the daughter of then-Georgia Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp was herself not able to vote because of the Georgia election laws. The argument is that Georgia has a tight process, there is no racial bias in it, and that such a process works for the state of Georgia.

So let’s look at the history of that law as well as how it violates the 1993 National Voting Rights Act and how a Republican-dominated Supreme Court is able to back up the state law over the national one.

We’ll start with party history in Georgia. When looking at party control of the legislature and governor’s office, Republicans have been in control of the legislature since 2003 and the governor’s office since 2005. Democratic Party control extends back all the way to before the Civil War, with an exception for Reconstruction. But the state’s party allegiance on a national level shifted in 1964 as they backed the Goldwater campaign over LBJ. Although Goldwater himself was a member of the NAACP, he had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that’s the key in this puzzle. The same political cliques that had controlled the state of Georgia since before the Civil War with the exception of Reconstruction did not want to see Reconstruction happen again. Their power derived from controlling access to the ballot and they were prepared to fight in court to keep their Jim Crow laws on the books.

In 1968, Georgia went even further down the segregationist path to support George Wallace for president. In 1972, the state went for Nixon. In 1976 and 1980, it was the home state for Jimmy Carter, but from 1984 on with the exception of Clinton’s run in 1992, Georgia has gone Republican in national voting, even while supporting Democrats in most state offices. Starting in the 1990s, however, Republicans start to arrive more and more in state offices until 2005, when they ran things across the board.

So what kind of Democrats were in power until 2002/2005 and why did they vanish from state offices? You can see evidence in the state flag of Georgia. In 1956, in the wake of the Brown school desegregation ruling, Georgia State Senator Jefferson Lee Davis co-sponsored a bill to change the state flag from one that featured blue, white, and red bars to one that had the state seal of Georgia on a blue bar on the left and the Confederate Battle Flag of the Army of Virginia where the red and white bars used to be. I bring up the name of the legislator because the name itself is documentation of the mindset of the time. The change in the flag was symbolic and part and parcel of a campaign to preserve segregation in the state. The segregationists were digging in for a protracted fight against federal requirements to end discrimination on racial lines.

After 1956, as segregation became a dirtier and dirtier word in national discussions, people tried to paper over the reasoning behind the flag, saying it was to honor Confederate soldiers. Even that reasoning is weak in light of how the Confederacy was militarily opposed to the United States and fought to preserve the institution of slavery. Honor that movement? Respect for soldiers and their memories can be done in museums and cemeteries – and if you think that this ties into Confederate statues, you are correct. These things came up to rally opposition to desegregation and racial equality.

Those Democrats that passed voter purging laws, referenced by the Secretary of State of Georgia? Those were segregationists. All through the 1970s, the segregationists kept a hold on the state party organs in and through the Democratic Party while supporting Republicans in national party politics. This was part of the Republican “Southern Strategy”, to court pro-segregationist voters in Southern states in order to capture the highest national office, that of the Presidency, with an eye towards how that office influences the makeup of the Supreme Court. To be sure, that’s the goal of the Democratic Party, as well, but the Democratic Party is trying to capture that office without appealing to pro-segregationist voters.

Keep in mind that ending segregation was never a matter of segregationists shrugging their shoulders and going home after LBJ saw through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ending segregation was a matter of using those federal laws to challenge state laws in order to provide true freedom and equality for people historically suppressed because of their race. The Dallas school district was still segregated in 1972, when they claimed to have ended segregation by allowing students from a single Blacks-only elementary school to apply to attend classes in a distant Whites-only elementary. Georgia was no different. Anyone who thinks that the Civil Rights movement ended in the 1960s is gravely mistaken. The fight continues.

As the Georgia Democratic Party started to catch up with the rest of the nation in putting forward Black candidates such as Andrew Young and starting to take an active interest in repealing Jim Crow legislation in the state starting in the 1970s, we can see the erosion of that party’s control in the state houses. Keep in mind that this is still a state where Whites are the dominant political force. They became that way because of laws that made it difficult for Blacks to vote, strengthened by laws that then removed voters for failing to vote. When the Democrats started to challenge the laws of their political legacy, the segregationists defected to the Republican Party, which was welcoming to the idea of continuing those segregationist laws.

There was a sharp cutover after 1993 – that’s when the US Congress passed the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) that made it illegal to purge voters for not voting, among other things. After 1993, Georgia’s state offices and senate representation looks much, much redder. The Whites who depended upon suppressing Black votes to retain segregation-friendly power dug in to protect those laws, and it was the Republican Party that afforded them that redoubt.

I’ll note that I see a similar seismic shift in Texas politics around the same time. It’s all red, all the time, after 1993 in Texas.

When the Georgia legislature finally removed the Confederate battle flag in 2001, that ties in directly with the final shift in state politics: Republicans took the legislature in 2003 and the governorship in 2005 and have held all three for the last 15 years. Basically, the segregationists washed away all their connections to the Democratic Party and ensconced themselves in the Republican Party. They were the same opponents of civil rights and racial equality, but they were no longer welcome in the Democratic Party.

And that’s why the law passed by the Democrats back in Jim Crow days was never taken from the books – the segregationists were able to block those efforts. When they could no longer do so as Democrats, they did so as Republicans.

There is zero mention in the National Review article or the Georgia Secretary of State page about how the voting purge law in Georgia violates the NVRA. Nor is there mention of how the State of Georgia fought to retain that voter purge law in the face of a legal challenge.

And yes, the voter purge law is so wide-reaching that it does take in some Whites in that dragnet. But when the targets of the purges are over 90% Black, one has to question if the law is truly race-neutral in its impact. Moreover, the methods used to establish the targets of the voter purges are themselves racially biased.

The State of Georgia has the following rules for voter purging:

How a registration becomes subject to cancellation:

Step 1:
A registered voter files a change of address request with the U.S. Postal Service or
Official election mail is returned undeliverable or
A person has no contact with elections officials for three years. Contact can be in the form of voting in any election or primary, signing a petition, updating voter registration, or renewing or changing a driver’s license.

Step 2:
Not responding to a confirmation letter mailed by the county voter registrar.

Step 3:
Having no contact with voter registration for two additional general elections, meaning not voting in any election or primary, signing a petition, updating voter registration or renewing or changing a driver’s license.

Step 4:
Failing to respond within 30 days of the notice which they are being sent by either
a.  returning the attached postage-paid postcard they will receive or
b.  updating their registration
1.  on registertovote.sos.ga.gov
2.  smartphone app, or
3.  visiting their county voter registrar’s office.

Now, federal law stipulates that re-registration is NOT required if a person moves within the county. It also stipulates that failure to vote may NOT be used as a criteria to maintain voter databases. So that “a person has no contact with elections officials for three years” is itself a violation of the NVRA. It’s also timed to not include the last presidential election cycle, which guarantees a huge number of potential candidates for purging.

Step 2 is “not responding to a confirmation letter.” Politicians know how to send letters that can’t be ignored: our mailboxes are full of oversized, colored cardstocks plastered with slick advertising in simple language. The Georgia confirmation letter violates every one of those principles of mass marketing, like it’s designed to be thrown away or not noticed.

Step 3 is an extension of the illegal “they didn’t vote” criteria.

Step 4 is another postcard designed to be ignored.

So when these postcards go out to an overwhelmingly Black population, it’s setting them up for failure. Because of the multiple steps, defenders of the measures will argue the virtues of each step individually, rather than take the steps in their totality and attempt to defend a process that targeted over 500,000 mostly-Black voters and stripped them of their votes, having the nerve to put the blame on the victim in this case.

The fact is that these voters were not lost in terms of tax payments or court summons processes: somehow, the people who had unverifiable addresses for voting purposes were exactly where they needed to be to pay taxes or to get called to court. Getting back to direct mail marketing technology, those people never stopped getting targeted mailings from an industry that has easily-replicable methods of address verification. That industry makes its money off of knowing exactly where everyone is, all the time. The politicians sending out the postcards rely on that targeting when it’s time to send out their election fliers, but they seem to be totally ignorant when it comes to making sure Blacks are able to vote.

It’s sad to state that the Republican Party in Georgia is a refuge for die-hard segregationists and white supremacists. It’s sad to state that the Republican Party in Georgia has targeted Blacks to remove them from the voter rolls. It’s sad to state that the Republican Party in Georgia continues the horrific legacy of racial inequality. It is sad, but true.

And what is sadder still, the Republican Party in Georgia is not “one bad apple”. It is representative of other state Republican Parties and the national party organization as a whole.

I’ll end with a 1981 quote from Georgia native and former national Republican strategist, Lee Atwater. I quote him in full, even when he uses unutterable words.

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don’t have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he’s campaigned on since 1964, and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.