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Joe Biden won the popular vote in the United States by over 6 million votes and won the Electoral College by the exact same margin that President Donald Trump did in 2016. Yet, Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues refused to concede the race, telling the public that his loss was a result of voter fraud. 70% of Republicans, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, agree with him, believing that the 2020 election was not free and fair. Donald Trump and the Republican Party (which has been doing this for quite some time) have tapped into the American idea that votes cast by white citizens are somehow more valuable than those cast by people of other races.
America has only become a true version of representative democracy (if that) in the past fifty years. Since the founding of the country up until 1918, over half of the current voting population were denied a voice in electoral politics. Until 1965, a majority of Black Americans in the South were unable to register to vote. The idea that only a certain type of person should vote is a significant part of American history.
There is no better example of this idea than the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in North Carolina. In response to a biracial government that was legitimately elected in 1896, a group of white Democrats killed Black Americans, destroyed Black businesses and property, and scared people away from the polls. It was led by a man named Alfred Waddel who allegedly instructed his supporters: “go to the polls tomorrow and if you find a Negro voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!” Afterwards, in 1900, the gubernatorial candidate ran on a platform of state-wide disenfranchisement of Black voters, stating that doing so would keep the peace. North Carolinians voting in 1900 agreed that pacifying white voters was more important than the voting rights of Black people.
You don’t need me to tell you that racism was alive in America then and that it still is today. However, what I am here to tell you is that the idea that the voices of members of racial minorities are less important than white voices, similarly to Alfred Waddel’s ideas, has a long history in America, and is being utilized by the Republican Party to control our politics.
Voter suppression has increased through the United States since the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. For a quick summary: Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act declares that states with a history of racist legislation cannot make laws that infringe on people of color without the federal government’s permission. It was made in response to laws such as poll taxes that were imposed during the Jim Crow era in the South to suppress the votes of mainly Black voters. Within hours of this decision, Texas passed a voter identification law and many other Southern states followed with their own laws, attempting to lower the number of people who could vote.
In June of 2020, Georgia held its primary elections. In a community where more than 90% of registered voters were minorities, the average minimum wait time was 51 minutes. In comparison, the average minimum wait time in communities where more than 90% of registered voters were white was 6 minutes. This, likely done by design, is similar to other systems in Southern states where a multiple new versions of a poll tax have been implemented, with time being the poll tax in this case. When speaking about the latest proposed congressional stimulus bill, which contained a program to make voting easier, Trump spoke of his opposition to the bill because, in his words, the bill “had things – levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Now, Trump is blaming his electoral loss on voter fraud and is using the code word “corruption” to challenge the votes in cities such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit, all of which have significant minority populations. His Republican colleagues have remained quiet on the issue. Republicans, as a bloc, have readily bought into the idea of inferior votes corrupting the election, as illustrated by 70% of Republicans believing the election was not free and fair. By doing so, they accept Trump’s claims of fraud in minority voting districts, a belief which is eerily reminiscent of the belief in Wilmington, North Carolina, that the judgment of white voters was more important than that of any other race.
This election was not a repudiation of Trump, as many wished. Rather, it showed how America’s racist past influences its present. Given this, Biden’s promise of a “return to normalcy” is an alarming catchphrase for the next four years.•
