As Missourians prepare to vote November 6 under a voter photo ID law designed specifically to suppress the black vote, it’s good to remember that nationwide voter suppression laws were kick-started in 2000 by both a racist Republican Party and by incompetent, lazy, and inattentive St. Louis officials.
Suppression of non-white votes is an outgrowth of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy of the ‘70s. This strategy gave racist white Southern Democrats a new home in the GOP, which campaigned against everything from the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action to the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. But Republicans had a problem: whites were shrinking as a percentage of the total population, while non-whites (who tended to vote Democratic) were making up an ever-increasing share of America.
Paul Weyrich, a right-wing political operative who named the Moral Majority after co-founding it with Virginia televangelist Jerry Falwell in 1979, delivered the answer in a Dallas speech to the Moral Majority in October 1980, shortly before candidate Ronald Reagan addressed the group.
“Too many of our Christians have the goo-goo syndrome, the ‘good government’ syndrome,” Weyrich told thousands of white evangelicals. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote … Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
And there it was. Right-wing, God-fearing white people could only win elections if they voted and, at the same time, kept other people, the non-white ones, from voting. That theory sat on the shelf, as full of toxins as a five-year-old can of tuna fish, for two decades, until the St. Louis election board brought it back to life on Election Day in 2000 and weaponized it for the GOP’s use.
Through some of the most breathtaking incompetence this side of Venezuela’s economy, 49,589 city voters were removed from the active voter rolls by the election board. They were placed on a so-called “inactive” list. All of the voters were supposed to have been notified by postcard. Almost none were, because the election board either had outdated addresses or wrote the wrong addresses on the postcards. So almost 50,000 people, almost all of them black, were purged from the voting rolls because the postcards came back marked “addressee unknown.”
Emory University professor Carol Anderson, author of the book “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” dissected the ensuing disaster in the New York Times on September 8. Election Day in parts of the City of St. Louis was a fiasco. People whose names were purged, but who were never notified, showed up to vote and were told (illegally) that they couldn’t cast a ballot at their normal polling place.
Instead, they were forced to go downtown to the election board if they wanted to vote. The incompetent and understaffed board staff couldn’t handle the tsunami of voters that showed up at 300 North Tucker. As the 7 p.m. poll closing deadline approached, hundreds of voters were still in line. Voting rights activists got a court order forcing the polls to stay open. They were only open for an additional 45 minutes until another court order, obtained by the GOP, shut them down.
The evening of the 2000 vote, and again the next morning, then-U.S. Senator Kit Bond (R-Missouri) went before the cameras and delivered sputtering, sweating, high-volume condemnations of the polls being open late, claiming that massive inner-city (black, of course) voter fraud had been perpetrated. Bond’s performances were so red-faced and emotional that some observers worried he might have a stroke on the spot as he claimed dead people had voted, that people had voted twice, and that the mammoth fraud had been solely for the benefit of Democrats (again, black, of course).
The subsequent investigation proved Bond to be 99.9997 percent wrong. Of all the cases investigated, only six people were have found to cast ineligible ballots, 0.0003 per-cent of the Missouri total. But like any good racist narrative, facts didn’t matter to the dog-whistle subtext: criminal blacks had graduated from stealing white people’s cars and TVs to stealing their elections.
Bond became one of the chief champions of the innocuous-sounding Help America Vote Act, or HAVA. HAVA proved the old Middle Eastern saying – “If you let a camel get his nose under your tent, his butt will soon follow” – by requiring an ID from voters registering to vote by mail or online. That soon morphed into today’s voter photo ID laws which, as a 2016 study from Michigan State and Bucknell universities proved, are designed to depress voter turnout among minorities.
Following the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republicans were poised to wage full-scale war on the ability of non-whites to vote. When the Trump administration came to power, it immediately ignored a real problem – Russian meddling in the 2016 elections – by focusing on a problem that doesn’t exist—so-called “voter fraud.”
A Trump-appointed commission headed by a champion of voter suppression, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, tried, and totally failed, to find any evidence anywhere of voter impersonation, dead people voting, voting twice, or any other form of fraud. The commission disbanded after discovering only one thing: that the premise upon which it was established was a lie.
But Trump and his GOP sycophants are still peddling the big lie that fraud is a problem and voter photo ID is the answer. Among them is Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who has repeatedly said that election hacking by Russia is not a problem, while voter fraud is.
So when you vote November 6, remember to bring along a government-issued photo ID or other acceptable identification. And thank the St. Louis election board and Kit Bond for making an ID necessary so the GOP can stop VWB – voting while black.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
