Voting in a Storm

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, in addition to dealing with massive devastation, state officials, especially in Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina, needed to decide what action was to be taken with respect to the upcoming election.  For Florida, that problem was compounded by Milton, the second of nature’s climate-change-induced one-two punch.

Each of these states is controlled by Republican legislators and two have Republican governors, all of whom are aware that the greatest impact of the storms was in areas that deliver hefty Republican majorities every election day.  If their party is to take back the White House, those majorities may well be desperately needed in Georgia and North Carolina, and, if the polls are understating Harris’s support, perhaps in Florida as well.

But the election apparatus in these storm-ravaged counties, many of them rural, has been victim to the hurricanes as well.  Deadlines for mail-in voting cannot be met if there is no mail service and in-person voting impossible if there is no place to vote or if voting machines have been rendered unusable.  Poll workers, themselves dealing with loss, will be in short supply.

Then there is the problem of persuading voters for whom the election has receded in importance to more immediate questions of survival that they must save the nation from Satanic Democrats and their nefarious plot to induce dark-skinned drug dealers, rapists, and terrorists to swarm over the borders.

The obvious answer is to relax voting rules to allow those who cannot vote as they had planned to cast ballots either by means of extended hours, expansion of the early voting window, through drop boxes brought into town centers, or even allowing voters to drop off ballots at schools, government buildings and libraries in different counties.  There is precedent for these sorts of extraordinary measures, of course, and it is only four years old…the Covid 19 pandemic.

The problem for Republicans is that not only did they then oppose easing access to the ballot box, which in 2020 was seen as favoring Democrats, especially African Americans, but they also denounced these measures as enabling fraud and robbing Donald Trump of his honestly won re-election.  They even brought dozens of lawsuits to have votes cast through alterations in state voting laws disallowed.  Then, of course, even after the riots on January 6, many Republican congresspeople refused to certify the election on those very grounds.

It will surprise no one that the Republican tune has changed from a dirge to a battle hymn.

In North Carolina, for example, the Republican-dominated election board unanimously approved emergency measures for counties hit hardest by Helene, including allowing local boards to modify early voting days, hours, and sites, and open a polling place in another county if their own has been impacted.  In addition, anyone who is unable to get to his or her assigned voting site to cast a ballot can do so at the county’s elections office.  In Florida, 2020 critic Ron DeSantis, ever true to his principles, has taken similar steps to loosen state voting rules to aid those in hard-hit counties, most of which happen to be Republican. 

Not one “Stop the Steal” was heard.

Alas, this is not the first occasion in which power-greedy white supremacists have conditionally contorted voting rules to ensure political dominance. This precedent is ugly and more than a century old.

In 1890, Mississippi became the first state of the old Confederacy to redraft its Constitution after whites had retaken control of state government.  New constitutions were the third of a three-phase campaign to rob the vote from Black Americans, undo the successes of Reconstruction—which were many—and restore the South to white rule, as God intended.

The first had been terror, with groups such as Ku Klux Klan and the Order of the White Camelia operating largely in rural areas of the South and employing beatings, murder, torture, arson, and rape to “discourage” Black voters.  When that didn’t work to the degree hoped for, Redeemers, as they were called, moved to fraud—stuffing ballot boxes with white votes, destroying Black ones, and creatively counting what was left. 

While this was more successful and eventually allowed Redeemers to retake state legislatures, many white leaders found fraud…indelicate.  As one put it:

“If we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law—not by force or fraud.  If you teach your boy that it is right to buy a vote, it is an easy step for him to learn to use money to bribe or corrupt officials or trustees of any class. If you teach your boy that it is right to steal votes, it is an easy step for him to believe that it is right to steal whatever he may need or greatly desire.”

So Mississippi called a constitutional convention, its purpose clear.  “It is frankly admitted that the great question before the convention is a political one—how to frame the laws so as to keep the control of the State with the whites for all time to come, how to prevent it from ever falling again into the hands of negroes and carpet baggers as it did in 1868.”  Although they would vociferously deny it, these sentiments are uncomfortably close to those of much of today’s Republican Party.

Still, Mississippians soon realized that drafting a new constitution was not going to be the simple, straightforward operation they assumed.  Instituting such contrivances as literacy tests, poll taxes, or property requirements to deny the vote to Black citizens might easily sweep away poor and illiterate whites as well.  One of Mississippi’s United States senators, Edward C. Walthall, called a convention “an unnecessary, expensive, and dangerous experiment” which would “restrict the elective franchise by imposing on it conditions which would strike down tens of thousands of the best white Democrats in Mississippi.” 

The answer was to keep the rules but enforce them selectively.  And so, to prove literacy, aspiring Black registrants were given an incomprehensible legal clause to read and understand, while whites were given a couple of simple words, or if that was still too difficult, the registrar could help them along.  Poll taxes could be forgiven or paid by white benefactors and residency could be fudged.  Then there was the grandfather clause, a clearly unconstitutional ploy to eliminate just about Black voter while accepting just about every white one.

Mississippi was so successful that every other Southern state drafted a new Constitution over the next decade and a half.  The result was an almost total elimination of Black voters and decades of Jim Crow rule.  Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did that process begin to reverse—and the Republican Supreme Court is dutifully negating that law.

Deciding to change the rules only when it is your voters who will benefit while denying the same opportunity to those who would vote differently is just another version of walking in the footsteps of America’s racist past.