Yahoo Finance Voting rights suppression 'is a story as old as the South,' Senator Jon Ossoff says
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) recently asserted that Republican-backed legislation proposed voting restrictions in Georgia is "a new Jim Crow," referring to state and local laws that enforced racial segregation after the Civil War.
“This is a story as old as the South,” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above), adding: “One of the most threatening aspects of this current voter suppression push is that it’s not limited to the South. It’s a national effort by Republican-dominated state legislatures to nudge election law in a direction that gives them a partisan advantage.”
Following the 2020 election, at least 14 states unveiled stringent new laws targeting voter fraud despite there being no evidence that widespread fraud took place. Several of these states are in the South, although there are also new laws from places like Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Indiana.
A history of suppression
The South has a long history of voter suppression, particularly regarding communities of color.
The 14th Amendment, passed in 1867, granted formerly enslaved people equal protection under the law. Three years later, the 15th Amendment guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” giving Black men the right to vote.
However, racist leaders in government found legal loopholes to prevent Black men from voting by using methods like poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud, and intimidation. For example, some states used what was called the grandfather clause —i.e., If your grandfather had not voted, you could not vote —that meant descendants of slaves were ineligible. Other states, including Texas, held all-white primaries until they were struck down by the Supreme Court.
According to one historian, by 1910 only 15% of Black men in Virginia were registered to vote and under 2% in Alabama and Mississippi.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed most of these discriminatory practices. As a result, out of the 13 Southern states, just four had less than 50% of Blacks registered to vote within a year.
But in 2013, in a tight 5-4 vote with Chief Justice John Roberts dealing the decisive blow, the Supreme Court rolled back several parts of the Voting Rights Act, which enabled states to enact their own laws aimed at restricting voter access.
“That’s why Republican state legislators in Georgia slashed opportunities for early voting in runoff elections,” Ossoff said. “It’s why they’ve made it so much more arduous for seniors, for example, to participate in voting by mail despite not a shred of evidence that there was abuse of voting by mail. It’s why they’ve given partisan state officials the authority to take over local election boards.”
'Based on lies about election fraud with clear partisan intent'
Georgia has two Democratic senators after winning two runoff elections on January 5: Ossoff won his Georgia Senate unseated the Republican incumbent David Perdue and Sen. Warnock defeated Republican Kelly Loeffler in a special election.
That occurred two months after President Biden won the state, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Following the upsets, President Trump alleged that Georgia’s results were wrong. Early in January, then-President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger alleging massive voter fraud while also stating that “all I want to do … I just want to find 11,780 votes.” He also implied that Raffensberger not finding the non-existent ballots was a “criminal offense.”
In March, the state's Republican-dominated legislature passed a bill creating new voting restrictions.
The new law includes strict voter ID requirements, outlawing election officials from mailing absentee ballots to all voters, banning the provisions of food or water to voters waiting in line, prohibiting most mobile voting centers, removing the secretary of state from the position of being a member on the State Election Board, and giving the Republican-controlled legislature more control over that same board.
Ossoff called the restrictions “very, very dangerous” and criticized state legislature for passing bills “based on lies about election fraud with clear partisan intent.”
“Think about how dangerous that is — we just had a situation where the former president of the United States was threatening Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, threatening criminal prosecution if he didn’t break the law to ‘find the votes’ — that was President Trump’s quote — to push Trump over the top in Georgia, despite the fact that he lost,” Ossoff said.
On the federal level, the Senate was recently unable to reach a bipartisan agreement on a new voting bill as Democrats pushed for more federal oversight while Republicans supported more restrictions.
“Under Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, the U.S. Congress has the authority to regulate how federal elections are held," Ossoff said, "and we must pass voting rights legislation to secure the franchise for every American citizen."
Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on Twitter @adrianambells and reach her at adriana@yahoofinance.com.
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