58 pages • 1 hour read
Carol AndersonOne Person, No Vote
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Conclusion and AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Conclusion Summary: “At the Crossroads of Half Slave, Half Free”
After the 2016 election, the media fixated on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s exploitation of social media to provoke political tensions in Donald Trump’s favor. This included Woke Blacks, which advocated for social justice before urging African Americans to boycott the election, and Blackivist, which had more followers than Black Lives Matter’s official account because of bots. While this issue is serious, it is really “piggybacking” on existing GOP efforts to stifle elections (150).
After Barack Obama won Indiana, then-Governor Mike Pence enacted a law that required counties with at least 325,000 residents to get bipartisan election board approval to open multiple early voting locations. As a result, Indianapolis’s county lost two sites while less-populous areas increased theirs. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp launched prolonged investigations into the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center and New Georgia Project that produced no evidence. More states enacted new voting restrictions in 2017 than in the previous two years combined.
In contrast, Democrat states took measures to facilitate voting. Oregon introduced automatic voter registration (AVR) in 2015 to automatically register citizens to vote upon applying for or renewing their driver’s licenses. The state’s rolls increased by more than 222,000 with voter turnout increasing from 64% to 68% in 2016. California built upon this with preregistration that activates once the person turns 18. When turnout decreased in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, city leaders increased the number of early voting sites while civic groups challenged GOP-led state offices.
More work is necessary. The United States ranks towards the bottom of developed democracies in turnout, and 77 million Americans aren’t registered—more than the populations of the largest 100 US cities combined. Latinos make up 39% of Texas’s population, but low voter representation allows US Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn to push their anti-immigrant agenda. Nationwide, 42% of Latinos, 43% of Asians, and 31% of Black people are not registered.
However, voter suppression is now normalized. It exposes the United States to foreign influence, makes the House of Representatives unrepresentative of its population, enables the Trump presidency, and allows the Senate to fill the courts with young conservative loyalists. The current situation, where one half of the company moves towards freer elections and one half away from them, is as unsustainable as slavery.
Afterword Summary: “We Are Going to Warrior Up”
Republican-controlled governments continued to exploit their power before the 2018 midterm elections. In response to the Standing Rock protests and other displays of Native American political power, the North Dakota state legislature passed laws that restricted voter IDs to three options with street addresses, which are uncommon in reservations. The Native American Rights Fund won an injunction against it, but the Supreme Court upheld the law just weeks before the election.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp ran a Trump-like race for the governorship against Democrat Stacey Abrams, and he refused to resign his position overseeing elections. Georgia closed 200 polling places since Shelby, mostly in Black and poor neighborhoods. A state advisor attempted to close seven of nine sites in Randolph County using the Americans with Disability Act as cover. From 2016 to 2018, Georgia eliminated over 10% of voters from the rolls, and Kemp removed 85,000 more just before the midterms. One was an activist who voted in the primaries, and the ACLU won restoration for her and 159,000 similar cases.
Georgia has automatic voter registration and other progressive guidelines, but an Associated Press investigation found that Kemp’s office placed 53,000 cards in “pending” status on the last day for Exact Match discrepancies, with 70% from African Americans in major cities. During early voting, Jefferson County officials stopped a senior citizen bus funded by the nonpartisan Black Voters Matter for supposed safety reasons.
Outdated voting machines with no auditable paper trail also threatened election security. Kemp ignored warnings for years until a hacker convention hijacked the devices with minimal effort. When civil rights groups sued the state about hacking in the 2016 and 2017 elections, the university that stored election data procedurally destroyed its server (185). Kemp then removed 18,000 machines in Democratic counties while still refusing federally funded replacements. On Election Day, machines in at least four Atlanta locations went down for hours, and a predominately Black precinct received a third of requested machines. Furthermore, Kemp did not investigate how the insurance commissioner race received more votes than the one for lieutenant governor—enough to cover the more prominent race’s margin of victory.
Kris Kobach ran for governor in Kansas. In majority Hispanic Dodge City, a county clerk moved the one polling place for 13,000 voters to an out-of-city site inaccessible by public transportation. The ACLU and League of United Latin American Citizens sued for a second location, but the judge dismissed these concerns and allowed this manufactured crisis to continue.
Targeting North Carolina’s growing Asian and Hispanic populations, ICE and Jeff Session’s DOJ went “fishing” for fraud by issuing subpoenas for years of voting records, particularly non-English applications (178). The bipartisan state board of elections refused to comply. In the Ninth District, election guru Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. paid fixers to fill blank absentee votes with straight Republican tickets for candidate Mark Harris. Significant portions of African American and American Indian absentee ballots also went missing. Searching for excuses for his election loss, Governor Pat McCrory claimed that Dowless was a victim of voter fraud. While at trial, the Republicans accidentally uncovered his scheme to steal the election. Dowless’s men and Harris’s attorney son testified against the two.
In Waller County, Texas, election officials tried to prevent early voting at the HBCU Prairie View A&M despite funding lower-turnout locations. When the NAACP LDF threatened the lawsuit, the county only gave three weekdays of early voting to the college with two of them off campus. The judge sided with the county, stating a request by a Democratic official. Meanwhile, Texas Secretary of State David Whitely removed 95,000 alleged non-citizens from voter rolls. Yet an investigation showed that over 50% of suspected names in two counties were actually citizens whose statuses weren’t updated in the drivers’ license database. Whitely then proposed legislation to purge suspected noncitizens from rolls and jail uncooperative officials. Texas civil rights groups went to court, and a US District Judge found that these acts violate the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Associated Press found that Republicans won 16 more House seats than expected and held onto up to seven vulnerable state legislatures in the 2018 elections. Meanwhile, Florida voters approved a state constitutional amendment to automatically re-enfranchise felons after their sentence, but the state legislature instituted a poll-tax-like requirement to pay all fines first.
There are signs of progress. The year 2018 had the highest midterm turnout since 1914. Three states introduced nonpartisan redistricting commissions, and two states approved AVR. New Jersey voters prevented a Democrat gerrymandering scheme, while Kansas’s Kobach and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker lost their elections. The House of Representatives became more diverse and female with 40 flipped districts. However, the burden of preserving democracy is now in voters’ hands.
Conclusion and Afterword Analysis
While discussing the Russia investigation, Anderson shares phrases like “the lesser of two devils” from the accounts that demonstrate their poor English (149). Both Mueller’s final report and a 2020 bipartisan report found fake accounts and evidence of Trump campaign leaders coordinating efforts with Russia. Anderson notes that a Russian ambassador visited the small university that houses Georgia’s election data before it destroyed its server. However, the intrigue of a hostile foreign power overshadows how turnout depression has always been part of American politics (Jeremy Herb et. al. “Bipartisan Senate Report Details Trump Campaign Contacts with Russia in 2016, Adding to Mueller Findings.” CNN, 20 August 2020).
Ten states now employ automatic voter registration programs with 15 introducing AVR proposals in 2018. One of the challenges of AVR adoption is that it is largely a Democrat state affair even though Illinois’s AVR program is a rare bipartisan effort that ensures accurate voter rolls due to automatic updates. The US Senate does have a national AVR bill in the pipeline, but it has no GOP support. In addition, Georgia’s refusal to approve 53,000 cards shows that AVR is vulnerable to bureaucratic abuse.
In the Afterword, Anderson depicts signs of political regression in the wake of the Trump administration. She begins with quotes from Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith advocating for the suppression of liberal voters and public hangings. When the Dodge City county clerk received the ACLU’s letter demanding that she open a more accessible polling location, she included an “LOL” in the email she sent to Kobach.
“We are going to warrior up,” is a quote from O.J. Semans of the Native American organization Four Directions (162). North Dakota’s ID laws directly target Native Americans: While an address requirement sounds like common sense, reservation residents mainly use P.O. Boxes and don’t need street addresses to navigate their neighborhoods. They would have to call 911 to learn their address, but they will violate the law if the given address doesn’t match county records. Anderson points out the hypocrisy that citizens must scramble to get valid addresses weeks before the election while the state doesn’t have to provide credible concerns.
The 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election represents an apex in voter suppression: a regulation-abusing official now seeking the state’s highest office for himself. Kemp needed those advantages with a 90% disapproval rating among African Americans according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. The attempted closing of polling sites for ADA violations, even though they ran elections earlier that year, is an example of how politicians can weaponize civil rights legislation for ulterior ends. In addition, the county in question received funding to address these issues but only upgraded the courthouse. Stacey Abrams would have become the United States’ first Black female governor if she had won, and she became a voting rights advocate after the election.
Voting machines bring new wrinkles into election security as civil rights groups prefer paper ballots that can be recounted. Georgia purchased new machines for the 2020 primaries; unfortunately, polling places in Black districts had only one voting machine each fraught with malfunctions and inexperienced technicians (Halpern, Sue. “How Electronic Voting in Georgia Resulted in a Disenfranchising Debacle.” The New Yorker, 12 June 2020).
Instead of covering Texas’s close Senate campaign, where Senator Ted Cruz narrowly defeated Democrat Beto O’Rourke, Anderson focuses on the early voting situation at Prairie View A&M University, which has a history of conflict with the Waller County. This included Symm v. United States (1979), where the county tried to enforce a property tax requirement that would disfranchise the temporary college students living there. Anderson calls fraud claims by Trump and Whitely in the state, which will become majority Hispanic by 2022, a “Brown Scare” (191).
The North Carolina subpoena threats are disturbing. The claim is far reaching, much like the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and places sensitive information in danger of hacking and depresses turnout due to ICE’s intensified detention and deportation efforts under Trump that can ensnare legal citizens. Eventually, North Carolina turned in about 789 records (Bonner, Lynn. “The Trump Administration Will Get Files on 789 North Carolina Voters.” The News & Observer, 6 February 2019).
While Anderson does see signs of hope, both the Conclusion and Afterword caution about America’s fragile American democracy. In the Conclusion, Anderson echoes Abraham Lincoln’s warning that the nation cannot remain half-enslaved and half-free, elevating the voting rights struggle to the level of the abolition movement. In the Afterword, she points out the inequality of the citizen’s and state’s obligations to fair elections. The state doesn’t have to provide reasons for their restrictions, but citizens must leap through hoops to practice their rights. If people and civil society do not fight against this entrenched and powerful opponent, “there wouldn’t even be a hope of a United States of America in 2020” (195).
