The
game Trivial Pursuit—a board game in which opponents quiz one
another—asks the question: True or false, the right to
vote has always been guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The answer
is, of course, false.
However,
the struggle to gain the right to vote is part and parcel of the
heroic history of African Americans, women and other oppressed and
exploited groups. Even today immigrants and former prisoners struggle
for this basic democratic right.
The
U.S. ruling class ultimately decides for whom we may vote, as this
tiny elite controls ballot access, the media and other arenas so that
their pick will appear to be the people’s choice. Now the right to
vote is under attack in several states in an effort to further
curtail any possibility of popular intervention in the 2012
elections.
This
attack is coming in the form of new laws that require voter
identification, restrict same-day voter registration, restrain voting
drives and voter information correction at the polls, make it more
difficult for alternate parties to gain access to the ballot and
shorten the period votes can be cast prior to election day.
The
campaigns to push back voting rights have falsely claimed that these
laws are in response to voter fraud—a claim that research has shown
to be completely false.
Maine
has moved to end same-day voter registration, eliminating the right
to vote if one needs to register on election day.
States
that passed laws this year requiring voter identification include
Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Tennessee. Georgia and
Indiana already had such laws. Excessive voter identification
requirements are reminiscent of racist Jim Crow laws that were
overturned by the power of the Civil Rights movement.
In
Florida, where the 2000 presidential election exemplified the
continued racist election system, tens of thousands of Black voters’
ballots were disqualified. In Duval County, where Jacksonville is
located, more than 27,000 Black votes were disqualified.
Political
parties and organizations are now mobilizing to push back the Florida
law, which passed in April of this year. This new law requires
political parties that want to run a presidential candidate to be
recognized by the Federal Election Commission and submit 355,630
valid signatures to gain ballot access—a task that only a party
with millions of dollars can accomplish—just to participate in a
basic bourgeois democratic right. Even worse, parties would have to
pay the state to have the signatures “verified” after collecting
them.
This
same law also shortens the early voting period from two weeks to one
week. Early voting is used by many who cannot take time off from work
to vote or who cannot make it to the polls due to family
responsibilities, disability or other reasons. People from oppressed
communities often utilize early voting.
Capitalism
has never been able to resolve the contradiction between capitalist
democracy and the full participation of the people in voting. This
contradiction has been met with struggle for decades by those denied
this right.
The
women’s suffrage movement finally gained full voting rights in the
United States in 1920 with the 19th Amendment. Decades later, the
ruling class made concessions in response to the tremendous movements
against racist oppression, which won the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and
the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The
final battle will be won when workers’ democracy replaces the rule of
the rich, creating a new social order where all are participants in
the decisions for their choice for leaders—whether that election is
for the president of the nation or a leadership role in the
workplace.
The
Party for Socialism and Liberation is actively participating in
pushing back these racist, anti-democracy rulings in states around
the country.
