Voter ID Laws: Suppressing the Black Vote

Protesters march to defend voting rights on December 10, 2011. Photo by Michael Fleshman.

With the 2020 presidential election looming, and as President Trump falls further behind in almost all national polling, the Trump campaign faces a difficult re-election battle. They have made desperate attempts to tip the scale, launching an assault on the country’s most marginalized voters through various voter suppression tactics. While the Trump campaign has been public about their distrust of mail-in voting, the Republican Party has quietly, yet systematically, sought to make it more difficult for Black Americans to vote. Through the implementation of voter identification laws, the Republican Party has unabashedly disenfranchised Black voters.

The idea of depressing voter turnout to gain an electoral advantage is not novel. Ronald Reagan, two years after Democrats attempted to expand voting by mail, said the process had the “potential for cheating.” For decades, the Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) has cried wolf and warned of millions of fraudulent ballots tainting our elections. Under the guise of “saving our democracy,” the R.N.C. has justified using the fear of prosecution to dissuade voters in Texas and allowed the removal of 80 polling places in the greater metro Atlanta area, where the majority of Georgia’s minority population resides. The most appalling, however, is the institution of voter identification laws that benefit Trump the most. 

Voter ID legislation dates back to 1950, during the height of the Jim Crow Era. South Carolina was the first state to pass legislation requiring some sort of identification document at the polls, with four more states quickly following suit. Over time, legislatures began imposing tighter restrictions on what constituted a valid ID. These restrictions targeted Black Americans who were less likely to have access to a “valid” form of ID. Today, 36 states require some form of identification in order to vote. Republicans have argued that voter ID legislation protects the value of the voting process for Americans who vote legally. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, in a speech delivered at Howard University, said that “showing your driver's license to have an honest election I think is not unreasonable. And I think that's the main thing that Republicans have been for." 

Despite their popularity among Republican legislatures, these laws are, in the words of the ACLU,  “a solution in search of a problem.” Since 2000, there have only been 31 alleged cases of voter impersonation during a time when over 1 billion votes were cast. Simply put, voter fraud is incredibly rare. So if voter ID laws don’t stop fraudulent voting, why do Republicans continue to tighten them? Well, the answer has a lot to do with race. 

Voter ID laws are a cleverly disguised poll tax. Voters must incur a number of costs in order to apply for government-issued identification. In the state of Kentucky, the home of Senator Paul, voters need to present a birth certificate, their social security card, proof of residence, and pay a $12.00 fee to obtain a government-approved ID. Up to 25% of Black citizens of voting age lack government identification, compared to only 8% of white citizens.  Black Americans are more likely to live in urban areas and therefore are less likely to have a driver’s license. The disproportionate impact of these laws demonstrate that voter identification requirements overwhelmingly have silenced, and continue to silence, Black voices. 

The Republican party has not been subtle about their intentions. In North Carolina, public assistance and state employee ID cards—which are disproportionately held by Black voters—were rendered invalid by a provision outlining a list of approved forms of identification. A federal appeals court stated that the provision “target[s] African-Americans with almost surgical precision." Despite the ruling, the Republican legislature shamelessly continues to challenge the court’s decision. On July 10th, attorneys for the R.N.C. filed a motion appealing the injunction against the implementation of the voter photo identification requirement. Make no mistake about it—voter ID laws are a relic of the Jim Crow era, and Republicans have only continued to revive it.  Likewise, in Texas, voter ID requirements have significantly influenced the outcome of elections. In 2014, a survey of 400 registered voters in Texas’s contested 23rd congressional district revealed that 12.8% of respondents agreed that their lack of voter identification was the reason they did not vote. It should come as no surprise that the Republican candidate was victorious. 

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Mesa, Arizona on October 19th, 2018. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

The 2020 election is proving to be another opportunity for the Republicans to continue to suppress the Black vote. This time around, the Trump administration has once again sought to undercut the legitimacy of the voting process. At a rally in New Hampshire, the President told supporters, “It’s also time for Democrats to join with us to protect the sacred integrity of our elections by supporting voter ID.” Trump complained of thousands of fraudulent ballots, and advocated for voter ID laws to be implemented nationwide. He has never once spoken about the impact that these laws have on minority communities or how they give Republicans an unfair advantage. 

Despite Trump’s fearmongering, his claims of voter fraud are false. A panel that the President organized to investigate election corruption found no evidence of fraud. One member of the panel, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, wrote that the panel’s evidence of fraud was “glaringly empty.” The Trump Administration later disbanded this panel. The President has also refused to say that he’d accept a loss on Election Day. His objective is clear. By claiming that the election is riddled with fraud before Election Day, the Trump campaign can justify enforcing stricter voter ID requirements. These stricter requirements, coupled with the disproportionate number of Black Americans that lack a government-issued ID, leads to depressed Black voter turnout. 

As the President continues to rail against voter fraud, his campaign has been silent on the true cause of fraudulent elections: voter ID laws. Currently, there is strong evidence that these laws give Republicans an unfair advantage. In 2016, they proved just how effective that strategy can be. In my home state of Wisconsin, a key battleground state, as many as 200,000 Wisconsinites were unable to cast their ballots during the 2016 presidential election due to a lack of proper voter ID—with communities of color being hit the hardest. Trump publicly supported voter ID legislation, and went on to win the state by roughly 23,000 votes. In a close election like 2016, carrying Wisconsin is paramount for Republicans to win the White House. Unsurprisingly, 95% of Republicans favored voter ID legislation in 2016. 

The 2020 election is going to look very different this year and requires collective action of all Americans to protect our democracy. With an influx of mail-in voting, and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, it is unclear if there will be a definitive winner on Election Day. In the midst of the deep political divide amongst Americans, the government should be expanding voting access, not strangling it. We must demand the federalization of automatic voter registration and the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would fully restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We must decide, once and for all, that voter ID laws are discriminatory and unconstitutional.

Collin Woldt is a staff writer at CPR and a freshman in Columbia College planning to study international relations and human rights. He spent his junior year of high school working for the United States Senate, and he hopes to become a human rights attorney.