By a 6-3 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Indiana can demand a state-issued photo ID before allowing a person to vote.
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Surveys have shown that requiring voters to have state-issued IDs disqualifies primarily poor people, African-Americans and Latinos, who are much less likely to have these documents. Voter ID laws are pushed by the right-wing, who usually claim to be concerned about “voter fraud.”
The court’s attempt at making a case for the racist law is pitiful. Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that there was no evidence of in-person voter fraud—the only type of fraud addressed by the law—ever occurring in Indiana history. The majority opinion cites an alleged incident of voter fraud in New York City’s 1868 election, and one incident involving a single person in 2004 in Washington. (Sacramento Bee, May 1)
Under Jim Crow laws passed after the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction, African-Americans in the South risked death by lynching if they demanded the right to vote. Racist Democratic Party state governments passed poll taxes and literacy tests aimed at African-Americans, though the laws could also be used against poor whites as needed.
Jim Crow segregation in the South was finally defeated by the militant struggle of thousands of African-Americans and their allies, whose victory was codified in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The present attack on the right to vote is led by the Republican Party with the assistance of the Bush Justice Department, which supported the Indiana law in arguments before the Supreme Court.
Voter ID laws are just one weapon in an arsenal of vote suppression tools. In Florida, armed agents of the state have questioned elderly Black voters about “voter irregularities.” In other states, uniformed Republican “election observers” have illegally demanded identification of voters approaching the polls.
In many states, convicted felons cannot vote. This has a disproportionate impact on African-Americans and poor people who are much more likely to be convicted by the racist and class-based U.S. “justice” system.
In Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, Republican operatives probably stole the election from the Democrats through intimidation of voting officials, stopping recounts and getting a ruling from the Supreme Court supporting a Bush victory.
Fixing elections is not solely a Republican Party tactic. In 1960, Democrat John Kennedy, the liberal icon, only won because Mayor Daley of Chicago stuffed enough ballot boxes for Kennedy to win Illinois.
Bourgeois elections are—in the final analysis—struggles between contending forces seeking to manage the capitalist state. Different sectors of monopoly capitalism back different parties based on which party will best serve their current needs. Often members of the corporate and financial elite back both capitalist parties.
When the Democrats support legislation that defends the rights of poor and African-American voters, it is not because they support the aspiration of these sectors of society. It is only because mass struggles of poor and African-American people and their allies have caused the ruling class to make such concessions.
Voting will never abolish the oppressive capitalist system, yet the right to vote is an important democratic right won through years of struggle. It is a right that must be defended and should be expanded for all workers.
The fight for the right to vote against all racist laws and practices that seek to deny rights to workers is a fight that should be taken on by all progressive sectors of society.
