“We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.” – left to right Thomas Jefferson, Chief Justice Roberts, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp

By Glen Reaux

In America,“We do not have government by the majority.  We have government by the majority who participate’”– Thomas Jefferson.  This principle has been the driving force of the Republican election strategy since the end of the Civil War.  The people who vote determine who runs the government.  Those who are elected to run the government set policy and establish laws.  These laws affect the quality of life in America, impact one’s ability to accumulate and maintain wealth, determine the health and life span of America’s citizens and in violation of the spirit upon which our great nation was founded, inflict oppression upon certain citizens.  When one is an oppressor, the very last thing the oppressor will ever allow is for the oppressed to have the right to vote.  When the oppressed are given the right to vote, the oppressor is always voted out of power.  This is the reason for the illegal gerrymandering activities that have been perpetrated upon the American people by the Republican Party.  The Republican Party, the party of “rich old white men” realizes that within a single generation they will lose control of the government to the proletariat and the middle class and will face their wrath.  The fear of this inevitable event leads McConnell, Graham, the 1%, corporate America, Trump and his minions to believe that Gerrymandering are Voter Suppression are the Republicans Keys to Winning in 2020.

Gerrymandering is defined as: manipulate the boundaries of (an electoral constituency) so as to favor one party or class.  Gerrymandering has existed in this country since its beginning.  However, since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Lincoln on January 1, 1863, which freed the slaves, it has primarily been used as a tool to deny African Americans and other ethnic minorities their constitutional right to vote in a fair and open election.  During the Jim Crow era, gerrymandering not only prevented African Americans from voting, but it also was used to prevent African American candidates from running effectively for office.  This left the African American population without the possibility of voting for politicians that would represent their interest thus rendering them second-class citizens for more than 150 years.  Now, with the increase in Asian and Hispanic populations and the cultural change in the souls of many White Americans, the dagger of true racial equality finally coming to America and significantly impacting the electorate has scared Republicans into a stupor of ignorance and desperation that will turn the 2020 election into an event rife with turmoil, dishonesty and illegal activities on the part of the Republican Party.  For them “Make America Great Again” or “Keep America Great” as espoused by their messiah, so-called-president Donald J. Trump really means keep America White by any means necessary.  This includes but is not limited to using crooked politicians and the courts to maintain their gerrymandering advantages.

In a 1965 attempt to prevent gerrymandering against African Americans, a provision prohibiting gerrymandering was placed in the Voting rights act of 1965^{1}. This provision made it illegal to draw districts that intentionally dilute the voting power of a protected minority.  However, in June of 2013, in a partisan line vote, the Republican Supreme Court Justices effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. Since striking down the protections of the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering has been on the rise in the southern states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

Gerrymandering played a huge role in the 2018 midterm elections.  Four extreme cases of gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures made it extremely hard for Democrats to compete in the midterm elections.  A 2018 pre-election report from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice showed the following was true at the time of the elections:

• In Michigan, even if Democrats win five seats with 38.38 percent of the statewide vote, they are not projected to compete for a sixth seat until their statewide vote share reaches 54.89 percent, an increase of 16.51 percentage points.
• In North Carolina, even if Democrats win three seats with 29.66 percent of the statewide vote, they are not projected to compete for a fourth seat until their statewide vote share reaches 52.78 percent, an increase of 23.12 percentage points.
• In Ohio, even if Democrats win four seats with around 26.07 percent of the statewide vote, they are not projected to compete for a fifth seat until their statewide vote share reaches 54.71 percent, an increase of 28.64 percentage points.
• In Texas, even if Democrats win 11 seats with around 31.92 percent of the statewide vote, and because of court-made modifications to the map, compete for a twelfth seat at around 41.07 percent of the vote, they will not compete for a thirteenth seat until their statewide vote share reaches 51.15 percent, an increase of 10.08 percentage points.

Results from the 2018 elections show how Republican gerrymandering has managed to minimize Democratic Party gains while allowing the GOP to maintain power despite a winning turnout by Democratic voters in many cases.  In the Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin state legislatures Republicans retained the majority in even though Democratic candidates won more votes overall.  Other states that sizable Republican advantages caused by gerrymandering in both congressional elections included Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Alabama and Texas.  Although Democratic victories mounted nationally in 2018, the Republicans advantage was more lopsided in those states which were controlled by Republican legislatures and Governors.

Another blatant example of how Republican gerrymandering denied African Americans representation during the 2018 midterms took place in Greensboro North Carolina.  At Caesar’s University, a historically black college, Republicans in the State Legislature divided the school when they drew the congressional map.  The effect of dividing the college diluted the African American vote by dispersing the Democratic voting bloc between two Republican-leaning districts.  Basically, the votes of the students were diluted by dispersing them into Republican controlled rural areas minimizing the effect that the consolidated African American vote would have had in the election costing them representation.

While the effects of gerrymandering on the 2018 midterms were devastating to the Democrats, under the current congressional maps drawn by Republicans, the 2020 elections and subsequent elections throughout the next decade could be even more disastrous for Democrats.  Currently, the Trump administration is on a quest to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census.  The Democrats are fighting this attempt in the courts.  If allowed, the census will become a gerrymandering tool that would allow Republicans to strengthen their power at the state level.  The Republicans want to draw congressional lines based upon citizenship or eligible voters as opposed to residents in each district.  This proposal means that elected officials can choose who they want to represent or their voters.  This also means that residents not eligible to vote would not have representation thus impacting their ability to receive federal funds for education and other federally supported programs.  The citizenship question also serves as a deterrent to Hispanic voters that are oppressed and fear the federal government.

Democrats have recently subpoenaed Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to provide documents leading to the origination of the citizenship question proposed for the 2020 census.  Both Barr and Ross defied the subpoena and refused to hand over the material. On June 12^th the House Oversight Committee voted to hold the two in contempt of Congress.  Subsequently, the matter was brought before the Supreme Court which on June 26^th decided against the Trump administration.  Chief Justice Roberts stated that the Trump administration reason for adding the citizenship question to the 2020 census as contrived; “The evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation (Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross) gave for his decision,” Roberts wrote. “The sole stated reason seems to have been contrived.”  So-called-president Donald Trump, while traveling in Japan, tweeted; “totally ridiculous that our government … cannot ask a basic question of citizenship” and urging that the census be delayed until the Supreme Court can be given new information.  For the census questionnaire to be printed in time for 2020, the government printing office must get started by the Middle of July.

While the effects of gerrymandering have obviously given the Republicans a huge advantage in state and federal representation, other insidious and illegal measures to tilt elections in their favor have also been effectively widely deployed and will surely play a significant role in the 2020 election.  Voter suppression campaigns run by Republicans adversely impacted the 2018 midterms.  There is no doubt that such tactics were responsible for many of the Republican wins including the Governorship in Alabama.  In a report published by the Center for American Progress in November of 2018 ^{4}, some of the tactics employed include but are not limited to:

1. Voter registration problems -In New Hampshire, for example, strict voter registration laws disproportionately disadvantaged more than 90,000 college students roughly 10% of eligible voters in that state. In Georgia, the secretary of State who happened to be the Republican candidate for governor placed 53,000 voter registrants—70 percent of whom were black— in “pending” status based upon minor misspellings or missing hyphens on their registration forms.  On November 2, four days before the election, a federal judge intervened to stop this practice citing the “differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities.  However, before being allowed to vote, those with pending registration status were forced to prove eligibility which includes U.S. citizenship posing problems for Americans lacking access to birth certificates, passports, or nationalization documents. In Michigan, problems were experienced due to the secretary of state’s alleged failure to update tens of thousands of voter registration addresses in the state’s voter registration database.
2. Voter purges –In June of 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that validated Ohio’s process for purging voters from voter rolls for not having voted in two previous elections and failing to return a mailer. In 2015, Ohio purged hundreds of thousands of individuals from its voter rolls for failing to vote since 2008. The vast majority of the people purged from the rolls were African Americans. It is interesting to note that nowhere in the constitution is it stated that failure to vote in prior elections is grounds for taking away an individual’s right to vote.  Point-of-fact, forfeiture of one’s voting rights is not found anywhere in the constitution.

Then-Secretary of State, now Republican Governor Brian Kemp, Since 2012 has purged an estimated 1.5 million people from the state voter rolls, 107,000 of whom were removed for not having voted in the two previous general elections.  These purges affected African Americans, whose voter registrations were removed 1.25 times higher than for white Americans.  The Arizona Republic did an investigative report that found registered voters in Maricopa County, Arizona, had been purged from the voter rolls nearly 1.1 million times since the 2008 election.  The report found that ethnic minority communities and low-income neighborhoods were removed from the rolls than people living in predominantly white or wealthy neighborhoods.

In Republican-controlled states, Native Americans were also and continue to be targeted for disenfranchisement through voter suppression.  And, the Republican Party’s Supreme Court played a major role.  In October of 2016, the Republican dominated court handed down a decision voted along party lines which required that a street address be listed on a voter ID as opposed to a P.O. Box.  In many Native American communities, P.O. Box addresses have always been used due to the fact that on many reservations, street addresses do not exist.  In the State of North Dakota which created the law, Native Americans vote heavily Democratic and were responsible for the defeat of the former Republican Senator by a Democrat.  Due to the Supreme Court decision, Democrat Heidi Heitkamp was narrowly defeated by her Republican opponent in the 2018 midterms.

In Dodge City Kansas where Hispanics make up 57.5% of the population of 23,740 people, the only polling place which had been located near downtown was moved to a location outside of the city limits and more than a mile from a bus stop.  This move which election officials stated was due to road construction was an attempt to prevent a large portion of the Hispanic community from voting.  Many members of the Hispanic community do not own cars.   Dodge City is not the only place that has closed polling places to hinder or prevent minority voter turnout.  Across the nation, Republican election officials have shuttered more than a thousand polling places in a three year period immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act. Once again, the Republican Justices voted along party lines in a 5 to vote intended to cripple the Voting Rights Act and help the Republican Party maintain a stranglehold on this nation by disenfranchising the minority voting block.

Judging from the history of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression in this country, it is clear that the 2020 elections on the national, state and local levels will not be free, open and fair.  Research from the government and private sector has provided irrefutable evidence that within one generation White people in America will become the minority and the voting power will lie in the hands of today’s ethnic minorities.  This reality is frightening to the party of old, rich, white men, the elitist 1% and corporate America, the GOP.  Along with voter suppression, gerrymandering is the Republicans key to winning the 2020 election.  Republicans realize this and as usual, will employ these tactics with impunity to maintain control of power over this government.  Minorities and women have to be prepared to fight them and win by any means necessary or they will face oppression on a scale not seen since Jim Crow thanks to the Republican-controlled Supreme Court.  These oppressed people must remember that:

“We do not have government by the majority.  We have government by the majority who participate.”

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Linked Sources and Documentation

1. Voting Rights Act of 1965:
2. Extreme Gerrymandering and the 2018 Midterms: https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/extreme-gerrymandering-2018-midterm
3. The impact of redistricting on your community: https://www.maldef.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/redistricting.pdf
4. Voter Suppression during the 2018 midterm elections: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2018/11/20/461296/voter-suppression-2018-midterm-elections/

Copyright © 2019, Glen Reaux, all rights reserved