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Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris told a virtual convention audience last week that “There is no vaccine for racism. We’ve gotta do the work.” This means tackling the many outcomes of structural racism on “education and technology, health care and housing, job security and transportation” and beyond. But as leaders dedicated to doing the work of organizing Black voters to exercise their power to dismantle inequality, we call out that COVID-19 is also cracking open the facade of free and fair access to the ballot.
Many Black voters feel they face two bad options — voting in person and risking their lives, or voting by mail and risking their voice. Their legitimate fears are fueled by efforts from the White House to destroy the USPS, and delegitimize voting by mail, actively suing 18 states that are acting to expand voting access.
Every voter deterred, every ballot disqualified brings them closer to their goal of shaving off thousands of Black and democratic-leaning votes.
When it comes to election fraud, Trump is like the pyromaniac who calls the fire department after he’s set the blaze. But he did not invent voter suppression and he can’t do it alone. There is a coordinated and concerted campaign with multiple access points to disproportionately marginalize communities of color. The RNC has doubled its budget to $20M to fund legal battles and their first national patrol operation in nearly 40 years, for which they claim to recruit 50,000 volunteer “poll watchers.”
A key element of the Republican playbook is cultivating a culture of fear, confusion and division. Why did Florida enact a modern day poll tax on nearly 1.5 million voters who had previous convictions? Why do Republican operatives fight to get Kanye West on the ballot in key battleground states? Why do stringent photo ID and signature witnessing requirements persist in places like Alabama? These are connected efforts, as elusive and elaborate as a spider web, to dissuade Black voters from being the most unified block in the country.
Voter suppression is decades old, but new tactics evolve with the times, and some are cloaked by serious public health concerns. Our concerns are well founded: Black people were three times more likely than white people to contract COVID-19, six times more likely to be hospitalized as a result and twice as likely to die.
Voting in person is one way to exercise power in a country that is clutching to the vestiges of systemic racism even as people march in the streets to dismantle it. Data from most recent midterm elections show that only 11% of Black voters voted by mail, which is half the rate of white voters and the lowest percentage of any measured ethnic group. We fill up buses, we drive our elderly to the town hall, we drag the kids, we pack stadium chairs and snacks because we know we might be waiting for hours.
In typical Trump fashion he’s the perpetrator playing the victim, but he is tapping into distrust of mail-in voting, with recent problems reported across dozens of states from Minnesota to Virginia to New York. Up to 1% of mail in ballots, which is small but not insignificant, were rejected during the primaries this year for mistakes in filling out the forms or arriving too late. Data show that Black voters are more likely to have their ballots challenged than white voters. Experts from the University of Florida found that Black voters were more than twice as likely to have their ballot rejected as white voters. During Georgia’s 2018 midterms, in the second most-populous Gwinnett County, some 4% of white voters’ absentee ballots were rejected, while 8% of Black voters’ absentee ballots were rejected.
Our democracy contains solutions to these attacks, but we must force those who claim to represent us to act. If the Senate refuses to protect our right to the vote, we will replace them with those who will. In the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court chose to strip protections for Black voters across the country, primarily in the South, thereby reversing progress that had been gained since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965. But new legislation sits on their desks, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which has 47 Democratic sponsors and one sole Republican, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. This must become law.
Black voters have rights, momentum and organizing skills, and we intend to use them. We call for the immediate defense of the USPS, additional election oversight from Congress and at the state level, and a robust monitoring system that holds election officials accountable. We need a massive education and mobilization effort, with local partners who know their own communities. Currently in 37 states there are legal efforts to protect voting access by addressing everything from expanding polling locations to accepting post-marked ballots to paying for their postage. We must make mail-in voting work as well as possible, with grassroots efforts to explain how to fill them out properly and expanding the availability of drop boxes.
Those states with early voting should optimize their window of opportunity, and give more time for participation and to account for errors. And every state should take the example of Virginia, which just required an intelligent mail barcode be applied to every ballot for tracking. And we must ensure that those who chose to vote in person can do so safely, with masks, social distancing and PPE if required.
We are rising to meet this moment with power and purpose. We’ve seen historic voter turnout in recent primaries in most states, significantly higher than in 2016 in Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Texas and Arizona. We are voting for the survival of our community and we will defeat those who are trying to drag us backwards.
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LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright are co-founders of Black Voters Matter Fund.
