Banana Republicans: Block the Vote

"Block the Vote" is the title of chapter five of the 2004 book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State (ISBN 1585423424).

Summary
In the face of overwhelming rejection from African-American and other minority voters, Republicans have adopted a two-tiered strategy:
 * 1) token efforts at symbolic inclusion, aimed primarily at soothing the conscience of white voters, many of whom want to see themselves as supporters of a racially inclusive party; and
 * 2) efforts to minimize the number and influence of black votes.

One strategy to suppress black votes has been to run negative campaign ads that accuse Democrats of racism. If blacks cannot be persuaded to vote Republican, the goal is to make them cynical enough that they won't bother to vote at all. A similar effort to suppress the black vote has been linked to black preacher Al Sharpton's campaign in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. Sharpton postured as a radical firebrand, accusing other Democratic candidates such as Howard Dean of racial bias. Roger J. Stone, a longtime Republican operative, told the New York Times that he had been behind several of Sharpton's most visible campaign tactics, including scrutiny of Dean's record of minority appointees when he was governor of Vermont.

Perhaps the most striking recent example of voter suppression came in the 2000 presidential election, where a slim margin of 537 votes in Florida gave George W. Bush the votes in the electoral college that he needed to claim victory over Al Gore. (Nationwide, Gore won the popular vote by 543,614 votes.)

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), produced a report in June 2001 titled "Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election." The report concluded, "Despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic." The USCCR found that African-American voters were at least ten times more likely to have their ballots rejected than other voters and that 83 of the 100 precincts with the most disqualified ballots had black majorities.

And Florida was not the only state whose elections had racially tinged inequities. Following the 2000 elections, the American Civil Liberties Union filed voting-rights lawsuits in Georgia, California, Illinois and Missouri, in addition to Florida.

Historically, both parties have used gerrymandering to maximize their political advantage wherever they have enough power to pull it off. Following completion of the U.S. Census once every ten years, whichever party is in control of a state takes full advantage of the opportunity to redraw the congressional district map to benefit that party's candidates. By packing as many members of the opposing party into as few electoral districts as possible, the party that controls redistricting can ensure that it will dominate elections in most of the other districts.

In recent years, Republicans have pursued redistricting with enthusiasm. Before redistricting after the 2002 election, Pennsylvania had 21 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 11 in the hands of Republicans and 10 in the hands of Democrats. Afterward, the state had 19 seats, 12 apportioned to Republicans and 7 to Democrats. In Michigan, Republican redistricting gave Republicans a 9-to-6 edge in the 2002 congressional elections, even though 49 percent of voters in the state pulled the lever for Democrats compared to 48 percent for Republicans. In Florida, they expanded their majority from 15-to-8 to 18-to-7 - "entirely due to redistricting," according to Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 by leading scholars, civic leaders and former elected officials.

Rather than making races more competitive - defined as where the winning candidate won with 55% of the vote or less - redistricting following the 2000 census actually left only 38 competitive House races in 2002. With the outcome virtually inevitable in all of the other races, it is hardly surprising that voter interest also waned, as turnout dwindled from 52 percent in 1992 to just over 38 percent in 2002.

In 2001, the Texas state senate was controlled by Republicans while Democrats controlled the state house of Representatives. As in Colorado, their inability to agree on a plan threw redistricting to a panel of federal judges, who drew up a compromise plan that maintained 17 Democrat and 13 Republican districts. After Republicans won control of the house in 2002, however, they drew up a new plan that all concerned agreed would likely give Republicans an additional seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Citing the voting irregularities from the 2000 election, in July 2004 thirteen members of Congress wrote to the United Nations requesting that it send observers to monitor the 2004 Presidential election. 

Discussion questions

 * Is it a reasonable thing for a political party to try to frustrate the ability of citizens to vote?
 * If voting is a legal right, how is it possible for voting to be "suppressed"?
 * Can electoral boundaries be redrawn to favour one political party over another? How?
 * How should electoral boundaries be determined to fairly reflect the will of the people?