One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson, Dick Durbin (Foreword by), Dick Durbin (Introduction)

Overview

As featured in the documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy

Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
An NPR Politics Podcast Book Club Choice
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by:
Washington Post * Boston Globe * NPR* Bustle * BookRiot * New York Public Library

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, the startling-and timely-history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin.

In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.

Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635571387
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	422,747
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Carol Anderson, PhD, is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bourgeois Radicals, and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A History of Disfranchisement

It was a mystery worthy of Raymond Chandler. On November 8, 2016, African Americans did not show up. It was like a day of absence. African Americans had virtually boycotted the election because they "simply saw no affirmative reason to vote for Hillary," as one reporter explained, before adding, with a hint of an old refrain, that "some saw her as corrupt." Another journalist concluded that because Clinton lacked the ability, charisma, or magic to keep Barack Obama's coalition together, "African-American, Latino and younger voters failed to show up at the polls." As proof of blacks' coolness toward her, journalists pointed to the much greater turnout for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

It is true that, nationwide, black voter turnout had dropped by 7 percent overall. Moreover, less than half of Hispanic and Asian American voters came to the polls. This was, without question, a sea change. The tide of African American, Hispanic, and Asian voters that had previously carried Barack Obama into the White House and kept him there had now visibly ebbed. Journalist Ari Berman called it the most underreported story of the 2016 campaign. But it's more than that. The disappearing minority voter is the campaign's most misunderstood story.

One Person, No Vote seeks to change that. Minority voters did not just refuse to show up; Republican legislatures and governors systematically blocked African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans from the polls. Pushed by both the impending demographic collapse of the Republican Party, whose overwhelmingly white constituency is becoming an ever smaller share of the electorate, and the GOP's extremist inability to craft policies that speak to an increasingly diverse nation, the Republicans opted to disfranchise rather than reform. The GOP, therefore, enacted a range of undemocratic and desperate measures to block the access of African American, Latino, and other minority voters to the ballot box. Using a series of voter suppression tactics, the GOP harassed, obstructed, frustrated, and purged American citizens from having a say in their own democracy. The devices the Republicans used are variations on a theme going back more than 150 years. They target the socioeconomic characteristics of a people (poverty, lack of mobility, illiteracy, etc.) and then soak the new laws in "racially neutral justifications — such as administrative efficiency" or "fiscal responsibility" — to cover the discriminatory intent. Republican lawmakers then act aggrieved, shocked, and wounded that anyone would question their stated purpose for excluding millions of American citizens from the ballot box.

The millions of votes and voters that disappeared behind a firewall of hate and partisan politics was a long time in the making. The decisions to purposely disfranchise African Americans, in particular, can be best understood by going back to the close of the Civil War. As a southerner explained, "Many Texans refused to accept the fact that the Negro was 'free and equal,' and stopped at nothing to prevent him from enjoying civic and political rights." After Reconstruction, the plan was to take years of state-sponsored "trickery and fraud" and transform those schemes into laws that would keep blacks away from the voting booth, disfranchise as many as possible, and, most important, ensure that no African American would ever assume real political power again.

The last point resonated. Reconstruction had brought a number of blacks into government. And despite their helping to craft "the laws relative to finance, the building of penal and charitable institutions, and, greatest of all, the establishment of the public school system," the myth of incompetent, disastrous "black rule" dominated. Or, as one newspaper editor summarized it: "No negro is fit to make laws for white people." Of course, the white lawmakers couldn't be that blatant about their plans to disfranchise; there was, after all, that pesky Constitution to contend with, not to mention the Fifteenth Amendment covering the right to vote with its language barring discrimination "on account of race." But, undaunted, they devised ways to meet the letter of the law while doing an absolute slash-and-burn through its spirit.

That became most apparent in 1890 when the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses — all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth. This feigned legal innocence was legislative evil genius.

Virginia representative Carter Glass, like so many others, swooned at the thought of bringing the Mississippi Plan to his own state, especially after he saw how well it had worked. He rushed to champion a bill in the legislature that would "eliminate the darkey as a political factor ... in less than five years." Glass, whom President Franklin Roosevelt would one day describe as an "unreconstructed rebel," planned not to "deprive a single white man of the ballot, but [to] inevitably cut from the existing electorate four-fifths of the Negro voters" in Virginia.

One delegate questioned him: "Will it not be done by fraud and discrimination?"

"By fraud, no. By discrimination, yes," Glass retorted. "Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose ... to discriminate to the very extremity ... permissible ... under the ... the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate."

The determination to wipe out the black vote ensnared whites as well, however. Though, for many of those in power, that was just fine. One Mississippi politician remarked that his state had to disfranchise "the ignorant and vicious white," too, so that the electorate was "confined to those, and to those alone, who are qualified by intelligence and character for the proper and patriotic exercise of this great franchise." The resulting "voter mortality rate" was staggering. Throughout the South after the widespread adoption of the Mississippi Plan, voter turnout plummeted to less than half of age-eligible whites, after it had peaked in 1896 at 79.6 percent. In Texas, for example, only 27 percent of age-eligible whites voted in the 1956 election (the national rate was 60 percent). The decline was even more dramatic in the Magnolia State. In the late nineteenth century, Mississippi's voter turnout was close to 70 percent; "by the early twentieth century it scraped near 15 percent."

While there was a steady erosion of white voters, the collapse of black voter turnout was precipitous. In Louisiana, where "more than 130,000 blacks had been registered to vote in 1896, the figure dropped to a bleak 1,342 by 1904." African American registered voters in Alabama plunged from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000 in just three years. As historian C. Vann Woodward concluded, "The restrictions imposed by these devices [in the Mississippi Plan] were enormously effective in decimating the Negro vote." Indeed, by 1940, shortly before the United States entered the war against the Nazis, only 3 percent of age-eligible blacks were registered to vote in the South.

That the states arranged to achieve this remarkable, systematic denial of the vote, while staying within the bounds of the Fifteenth Amendment, is a testament to the warped brilliance of the Mississippi Plan. Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-MS), one of the most virulent racists to grace the halls of Congress, boasted of the chicanery nearly half a century later. "What keeps 'em [blacks] from voting is section 244 of the [Mississippi] Constitution of 1890 ... It says that a man to register must be able to read and explain the Constitution or explain the Constitution when read to him." Mississippi, the senator bragged, "then wrote a constitution that damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain."

Bilbo was pointing to the power of the literacy test and understanding clause, which were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate. By 1940, more than half of all African American adults in Mississippi had fewer than five years of formal education; almost 12 percent had no schooling whatsoever. The figures were even more dismal in South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama. Deliberate under-funding of black schools was critical to the literacy test's disfranchising success. During World War II, for example, Louisiana spent almost four times as much per capita on white elementary schoolchildren as on African American students. Amite County in Mississippi scraped together $3.51 per black child but nearly ten times that amount to educate its white students. In addition, for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans. That set the stage for states such as Alabama — where more than 54 percent of black adults had fewer than five years of formal education — to require those who came through resource-deprived school systems and who wanted to register to vote to wrangle with the intricacies of constitutional law.

The process was, by design, simultaneously mundane and pernicious. At the registrar's office, while whites might have had a one-sentence section of the Alabama or U.S. Constitution as their litmus test for worthiness to vote, African Americans would get difficult, complex passages in order to prove their literacy, and then they would have to interpret that legal treatise to gauge how well they could actually understand what they had just read. This combination of literacy tests and understanding clauses was designed to thwart blacks' voting rights as they confronted a passage such as this:

SECTION 260: The income arising from the sixteenth section trust fund, the surplus revenue fund, until it is called for by the United States government, and the funds enumerated in sections 257 and 258 of this Constitution, together with a special annual tax of thirty cents on each one hundred dollars of taxable property in this state, which the legislature shall levy, shall be applied to the support and maintenance of the public schools, and it shall be the duty of the legislature to increase the public school fund from time to time as the necessity therefor and the condition of the treasury and the resources of the state may justify; provided, that nothing herein contained shall be so construed as to authorize the legislature to levy in any one year a greater rate of state taxation for all purposes, including schools, than sixty-five cents on each one hundred dollars' worth of taxable property; and provided further, that nothing herein contained shall prevent the legislature from first providing for the payment of the bonded indebtedness of the state and interest thereon out of all the revenue of the state.

And the registrar's decision on whether the would-be voter passed through this maze of legal gobbledygook was final. Non-appealable.

Black coal miner Leon Alexander knew this firsthand. He recalled the moment, shortly after World War II, when he tried to register to vote in Alabama. He stood there at the counter waiting and waiting while the registrar made a big show of deliberately ignoring him. Finally, when whites came into the office, the registrar greeted them, provided the paperwork, and promptly registered them to vote. Alexander nevertheless remained standing there, refusing to leave. Irritated, the registrar finally asked, "What you want boy?"

"I wants to register to vote," the coal miner replied.

The registrar got the form and took it over to Alexander, knowing perfectly well what the final result would be before the pen had even scratched the paper. The coal miner went through the literacy test writing, and writing, and writing. The moment he was done, without even reviewing the sheet, the registrar took Alexander's registration, "balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket."

"You disqualified," he said. "You didn't answer the question."

In the end, it took the intervention of three white officials in the local United Mine Workers union, who had to get Governor Jim Folsom involved, before Alexander was finally registered to vote. And even then, as the coal miner recalled, it was the registrar who got the last laugh. Alexander may have now been a registered voter, but there was one small problem: "They didn't put me on the voting list!" His name never made it onto the official rolls; therefore, he couldn't vote after all. Looking back, Alexander recalled, "this guy had no intention of registering [me], not only no intention of registering me, he had no intention of registering any black to vote."

Despite the fact that this scene played out over and over in registrars' offices across the South — where a registrar in Mississippi could even ask African Americans, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" — the law itself was just race-neutral enough to withstand judicial scrutiny. Not only did literacy tests appear nondiscriminatory; they also carried the aura of plausibility. Voters, everyone could agree, ought to be able to understand their state's laws. Yet when that device was made operational, it had nothing to do with the law, of course, nothing to do with an engaged citizenry, and precisely everything to do with eliminating as many age-eligible African Americans from the voter rolls as possible. Eighty percent was Carter Glass's goal. But the actual numbers were even more brutal. By 1953 in the Deep South, "eleven counties where the black population equaled or exceeded that of whites" had only 1.3 percent of all eligible blacks registered to vote. Two counties had no African American voters at all.

And then there was the poll tax, which all eleven states of the former Confederacy had adopted. Initially, after the Civil War, the poll tax "was intended not so much to disenfranchise the Negro as to place him again under the white man's domination, since failure to pay the tax was made prima facie evidence of vagrancy," which was the catchall term to criminalize, jail, and auction off African Americans. The "Negro who desired to stay off the chain gang was ... forced to place himself under the protection of a white man who would pay the tax for him." It was only years later, during the rise of Jim Crow, that the deliberate intent to choke off the black vote came into play when the states required all age-eligible males to pay an annual fee in order to vote. Its proponents wielded the seemingly rational arguments that it costs money to hold elections and that extra funds were necessary to meet the needs of democracy. Moreover, they said the poll tax simply provided additional revenue for public schools. As a revenue producer, it was "a flop," however; Arkansas, for example, raised "only 5 percent of [its] total school budget by the poll tax, a tax that [kept] a good 80 percent of [the state's] adult citizens from voting." But to many of the poll tax's proponents, the high "voter mortality rate" proved how important it was for vetting and weeding out those unworthy of democracy.

"Any person unwilling to pay a small fee in order to enjoy such a precious privilege did not deserve the franchise," its advocates proclaimed. Behind the veil of fiscal and patriotic duty, however, was the full understanding that without the poll tax, "Negroes would again be an important factor in southern politics." One man in Arkansas put it succinctly enough: "Do you want to see niggers in the state capital with their feet on the desk?"

The power of the poll tax derived from several key components. First were the arcane rules about when and where to even pay the tax. The "procedures," C. Vann Woodward observed, were "artfully devised to discourage payment." And, as it was law enforcement that collected the poll tax, the intimidation factor was very real in many locales. Sheriffs, notorious in the black community for their racism and brutality, were now the gatekeepers to the franchise. In Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, for example, "where most whites but few Negroes had registered to vote," the sheriff admitted "that he instructed his deputies to require all persons paying poll taxes for the first time to apply to him personally." There was another built-in obstacle, as well. In most states, the tax was due months before the election. One man noted that "paying a poll tax in February to vote in November is to most folks in Texas like buying a ticket to a show nine months ahead of time, and before you know who's playing or really what the thing is all about. It is easy to forget to do, too."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "One Person, No Vote"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Carol Anderson.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Senator Dick Durbin, ix,
One. A History of Disfranchisement, 1,
Two. Voter ID, 44,
Three. Voter Roll Purge, 72,
Four. Rigging the Rules, 96,
Five. The Resistance, 121,
Conclusion. At the Crossroads of Half Slave, Half Free, 149,
Acknowledgments, 159,
Resources, 161,
Notes, 163,
Index, 253,

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2018
In White Rage, a New York Times best seller that won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Emory professor Anderson chronicled efforts since 1865 to block the advancement of African Americans. Here she concentrates on efforts to curtail the African American vote since the 2013 Shelby ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Anderson considers both consequences—e.g., photo ID requirements—and means of redress.

Library Journal

…one part historical primer and one part spirited manifesto…[One Person, No Vote] seems to have been written from a state of emergency, in an adrenaline-fueled sprint. Anderson is a stinging polemicist; her book rolls through a condensed history of voting rights and disenfranchisement, without getting bogged down in legislative minutiae. This is harder than it looks; as Anderson explains, it's often through legislative minutiae that voting rights are curtailed…This trenchant little book will push you to think not just about the vote count but about who counts, too.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

09/24/2018
In this insightful study, Anderson (White Rage), Charles Howard Candler Professor of African-American studies at Emory University, scrupulously details the history of racially and politically motivated disenfranchisement in the United States. She focuses on four tactics that are currently harming the principle of “one person, one vote” enshrined by the Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr: voter identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, and “starving minority precincts of resources to create untenable conditions at the polls.” Keenly aware of both legal and social barriers to voting (such as lack of access to transportation, the internet, or wheelchair ramps), Anderson lays out in clear terms—often aided by damning, surprisingly blunt quotations from the perpetrators—how systems for disenfranchisement have been conceived, implemented, and defended. She illustrates their effects using relevant numbers and other statistics: for example, black Alabama households are three times more likely than white ones not to have access to a car, in a state where public transit is virtually nonexistent. She also takes a deep look at the multipronged, successful effort to restore black voters’ access to the polls to defeat Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in 2017, suggesting this as a model for future change. Anderson brings home that the current state of voting rights in parts of the U.S. is reminiscent of the height of Jim Crow. Anyone interested in American democracy or how equality can be not only legislated but realized will find this account illuminating and clarifying. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"One Person, No Vote reads like a speedy sequel of sorts to her previous book, the elegant and illuminating best-seller White Rage . . . Her new book seems to have been written from a state of emergency, in an adrenaline-fueled sprint. Anderson is a stinging polemicist; her book rolls through a condensed history of voting rights and disenfranchisement, without getting bogged down in legislative minutiae. This is harder than it looks . . . This trenchant little book will push you to think not just about the vote count but about who counts, too." - Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

"Anderson has a gift for illustrating how specific historical injustices have repercussive, detrimental influence on contemporary American life. . . . If White Rage is history as even-tempered cultural criticism—it was awarded the 2017 National Book Critics Circle citation in criticism—then One Person, No Vote is history as old-fashioned, coldblooded jeremiad: a lamentation about American democracy in crisis. Throughout One Person, Anderson’s tone, at turns urgent and indignant, seems to arise from the ease with which she can document abundantly—via investigative journalism, popular history and historical scholarship—the GOP’s determined efforts to purge American citizens and cull and homogenize the electorate." - Los Angeles Times

"As the last two national elections demonstrated, many Americans feel angry, frustrated, and confused by a voting system that simply doesn’t work; Anderson (White Rage) traces the ugly history of disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and suppression that disable true democracy." - Boston Globe, "Best Books of the Year"

"Anderson’s description of the perpetual war that blacks and now Latinos have fought to get and keep the right to vote is impeccably researched, deftly written and, sadly, prescient. . . . One Person, No Votes punches above its weight, like a lecture from a professor with superb command of language." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Powerful . . . Her book is a disturbing drill down into how the right to vote is being slowly destroyed with too few of us noticing." - Washington Post

"One Person, No Vote is a careful documentation of the ways in which Republican voter suppression efforts disproportionately and specifically affect minority voters. . . . Anderson’s new book, along with her 2017 volume White Rage, shows how difficult it is to separate out our current political situation from the legacy of Jim Crow’s racial apartheid system. The Republican war on the fairness of American elections is, by its nature, a project that targets one of the core victories of the civil rights movement." - Vox

"All of the books on this list have present-day implications, but perhaps none more so than this charged dive into voter suppression from the Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. One Person, No Vote looks at this history of this anti-democratic tactic, particularly its racist roots." - Entertainment Weekly.com

"Carol Anderson's prose is unflinching, and she wastes no time as she marches the reader from the openly racist, clear-cutting suppression tactics of the early 20th century toward the carefully veneered, ruthlessly efficient disenfranchisement campaign of the present. Whether you only think about voting on a single Tuesday in November or you're passionately engaged in the fight for the ballot, you will set this book down with the knowledge that it's all so much worse than you thought." - NPR, Best Books of the Year

"Voter suppression and disenfranchisement might be the most serious issue in American politics today. In this vastly important read, White Rage author Carol Anderson unpacks how the 2013 Supreme Court decision to roll back the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to a storm of government-led racial discrimination and voter suppression." - Bustle, 25 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year

"Through shrewd analysis and by following real voters, Anderson exposes the racial discrimination underlying government-sanctioned laws and practices like photo ID requirements and gerrymandering." - BuzzFeed

"Serves as a gimlet-eyed analysis of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Jim Crow laws." - O, the Oprah Magazine, 14 Books to Read before Heading to the Polls

"From photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures, Anderson details these discriminatory practices and the resistance movement that's fighting to restore every citizen's right to vote." - Teen Vogue, "7 Books That'll Help You Understand America's Voting History"

"Voter suppression is one of the most important threats to American democracy. You might already think this before reading Anderson’s book, but if not, the copious, well-researched evidence she presents here—that shows how Republican politicians have been systematically and purposefully stripping voting abilities from black and low-income voters—is difficult to refute. Immediately relevant and deeply disturbing." - LitHub

"Looking at gerrymandering, voter ID laws, the closure of polling places, and a host of other forms of voter suppression; Carol Anderson brilliantly shows how African Americans have systematically lost their voting rights since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today, as voter suppression disproportionately affect Black voters and our elections, One Person, No Vote is a necessary read that explains how disguised racism continues to impact our political institutions." - Black Perspectives, "Best Black History Books of the Year"

"This whiplash-inducing chronicle of how a nation that just a few short years ago elected its first black president now finds itself in the throes of a deceitful and craven effort to rip this most essential of American rights from millions of its citizens." - Starred Review, Booklist

"The award-winning author of White Rage explores the drive to purge voters of their right to cast a ballot, meanwhile exposing a decades-long plot to disenfranchise people of color. Her title serves as a gimlet-eyed analysis of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Jim Crow laws." - Oprah.com, “27 of the Best Political Books to Read to Process the 2020 Election”

"It is necessary that American students understand the world in which they live so that they do not allow their voices to be suppressed." - Starred Review, School Library Connection

"A ripped-from-the-headlines book . . . Anderson is a highly praised academic who has mastered the art of gathering information and writing for a general readership, and her latest book could not be more timely." - Kirkus

"Providing a fascinating historical context for current events, an insightful book to read and consider." - Booklist

"Insightful . . . [Anderson] scrupulously details the history of racially and politically motivated disenfranchisement in the United States. . . . Anyone interested in American democracy or how equality can be not only legislated but realized will find this account illuminating and clarifying." - Publishers Weekly

"A clear, concise, and compelling exploration of racialized voter suppression from Jim Crow through today . . . This book is impeccably researched and perfectly argued. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in politics, policy, and polling." - BookRiot, Best Books of the Year

"In White Rage, a New York Times best seller that won the National Book Critics Circle Award,Emory professor Anderson chronicled efforts since 1865 to block the advancement of African Americans. Here she concentrates on efforts to curtail the African American vote since the 2013 Shelby ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Anderson considers both consequences—e.g., photo ID requirements, poll closures—and means of redress." - Library Journal, Barbara's Nonfiction Picks for September 2018

"Well-timed . . . In a slim volume, Anderson details the outrages of Republican efforts to target largely minority voters and to limit their influence in elections. . . . Blood-boiling stories like these come rapid-fire in Anderson’s narrative, which is also peppered with a brief history of voter suppression dating back to Reconstruction." - Washington Monthly

"In her impeccably timed 2016 best-seller, White Rage, historian and Emory professor Carol Anderson took readers on a jarring and illuminating journey through America’s deep history of structural racism. Her new book, One Person, No Vote, connects that historical legacy with the resurgence of voter suppression that’s capturing headlines in 2018, thanks not only to the ascendance of Trumpism, but the state-level depredations of voting-rights foes like Brian Kemp in Georgia, John Husted in Ohio, and Kris Kobach in Kansas." - The American Prospect

"Reading Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy makes it clear that [voter suppression] is alive and well. With exhaustive research and documentation and compelling narrative style, Anderson conveys how the overtly racist poll taxes, literacy tests, targeted violence and intimidation that evolved after Reconstruction to prevent African-Americans and other minorities from voting have been supplanted by ostensibly colorblind efforts to fight voter fraud and game the electoral system." - Asheville Citizen Times

"Most of us are well aware that there is something fundamentally broken about the way we vote—but not why. In One Person No Vote, Carol Anderson offers up a timely, powerfully written, and comprehensive indictment of the (relatively recent) history of brutal race-based vote suppression, and its many modern iterations—from voter ID requirements and voter purges, to fraudulent election fraud commissions and stolen elections. Along the way Anderson traces the rise and fall of the landmark Voting Rights Act and how the Supreme Court continues to blinker itself to the ways in which American elections are neither free nor fair, and how the dignity of states and white voters continues to be privileged above the franchise itself. A must-read for anyone wondering why voting is the most important issue we continue to misapprehend." - Dahlia Lithwick, Chief Legal Correspondent for SLATE and host of the Amicus podcast

"As Carol Anderson makes clear in One Person, No Vote, the right to vote is under even greater assault today. For the sake of those who fought and died for it, it is up to all of us to insist that this most basic American right be protected. Reading this well-crafted book will arm you with the facts." - Senator Dick Durbin, from the Foreword

"An amazing book . . . a reminder that democracies only work if people participate. And we need to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to participate as our constitution guarantees." - Senator Tina Smith

"Carol Anderson is one of our most incisive and cogent thinkers regarding history's fingerprints on current affairs. With One Person, No Vote she has produced a crucial examination of a critical issue: voter suppression. At a time when democracy is under siege and the worst elements of the racial past are being resurrected we can scarcely afford to avert our eyes from our most pressing challenges. Carol Anderson looks at these issues directly, unflinchingly, and offers us an invaluable insight regarding where we are, how we got here, and how we might navigate our way to safer shores." - Jelani Cobb, author of THE SUBSTANCE OF HOPE

"Some of the most useful [books] have been those that show how so many of the fights that we’re having right now are fights that are constant, that are ongoing, that have been here since the very beginning. Like Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote, that looks at the centuries-long battle over voting rights and voter suppression." - Carlos Lozada, author of WHAT WERE WE THINKING: A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE TRUMP ERA

"You pay attention to the news and regularly try to stay up-to-date on the latest political happenings, so you’ve definitely heard about voter suppression and how it’s one of the most important issues in modern society. But for many, that’s all they know. If you’re looking to understand the ins and outs of what exactly is being done about voter suppression or what could be done about it, make sure you grab a copy of One Person, No Vote." - GetLiterary, 5 Books to Read if You Want to Become More Politically Engaged

"really fascinating … a good, accessible book" - BookRiot’s “For Real” podcast, “Black History Month Reads”

"Shocking and disturbing . . . an upsetting—but necessary—read." - Street Roots News

"Voter suppression is no accident, and Carol Anderson is here to make that abundantly clear." - BookRiot, “8 Nonfiction Reads About Social Justice”

From the Publisher

2018-06-27
A ripped-from-the-headlines book offering copious evidence of the Republican Party's relentless efforts to strip eligible voters of their right to cast ballots.After providing a look back at voter suppression throughout the history of the United States, Anderson (African-American Studies/Emory Univ.)—who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016), her top-notch dissection of racial issues in America—focuses on the years since 2013, when elected Republicans in the majority of states and in Congress ratcheted up their anti-democracy, racist campaign to reduce the number of black voters. The author begins by delineating the requirements imposed on voter identification at polling places. In general, the requirement to have a specific government-issued ID with an up-to-date photograph hits blacks and low-income individuals the hardest, and election officials specifying the requirements are acutely aware of that reality. As Anderson shows, they realize that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent in most locales, but they spread misinformation about the pervasive problem to defeat court challenges. In the next chapter, the author explains the inhumane and often illegal tactic of purging eligible voters from the master list. The officials often refuse to tell voters that a purge has occurred, rendering those voters helpless on election day. In her chapter "Rigging the Rules," Anderson focuses on the pernicious creep of disenfranchisement through gerrymandering. Many opponents of more accessible voting practices distinguish artificially between race-based gerrymandering and purely political gerrymandering of legislative districts, but the author offers persuasive evidence that both forms primarily target people of color. In the concluding chapter, "At the Crossroads of Half Slave, Half Free," Anderson connects Russian meddling in the 2016 election cycle with Republican voter suppression tactics.Anderson is a highly praised academic who has mastered the art of gathering information and writing for a general readership, and her latest book could not be more timely.

Kirkus Reviews