The Bigger Picture: Hate Crimes, Voter Suppression and Representation

by Pallavi Datta

As we have watched two more mass shootings with horror, it has been hard to compound the inexplicable motives that cause someone to commit such a heinous and unconscionable act and take so many innocent lives.The anti-Asian racial motive behind the Atlanta spa shootings is even more unsettling and heartbreaking. In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others, weaponization of anti-Asian rhetoric and appalling rise of AAPI-hate, and the rise of white supremacist groups into the mainstream culminating in the Capitol riot, the pandemic has magnified our socioeconomic divisions and racial prejudices.

Though many have condemned these acts, one of the most unsettling feelings is the apparent lack of action or retribution. While Congress is locked in stalemate once again, seemingly unable to address pressing issues such as gun reform, racial justice and addressing domestic terrorism, for too many, our government appears to be an almost antiquated institution, too caught up in bureaucracy, partisan politics and arcane rules to take action. At the same time, it is important not to forget the underlying larger-scale systems that stem social reforms and ultimately influence who gets to be in the rooms making—or not making—those decisions, writing legislation, and impacting our nation’s future. At the root of this lies our voting system which has been plagued by voter suppression, undermining of election integrity and gerrymandering—all of which are carefully engineered to disproportionately affect minorities. When these voices are silenced, legislators are not representative of the diversity of our electorate and therefore often unresponsive to their constituents’ demands and unwilling to effect change. Set in the backdrop of these recent hate crimes, Georgia recently passed a voter suppression law that makes it harder to vote absentee, allows state officials to take over local elections boards and overturn elections and makes it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line.

But this is hardly a new playbook. The voter suppression tactics today are the vestiges of the Jim Crow South and force us to confront our nation’s complicated racial history, also in relation to other minority groups such as Asian-Americans. When the Founding Fathers established America, declaring it a beacon of democracy, only 6% of the population was eligible to vote—white, property-owning men. After the Civil War, Reconstruction ushered in a period of massive expansion of civil rights through the Fifteenth Amendment, only to be neutralized by the Mississippi Plan of 1890, thus starting the systemic exclusion of African-Americans from the politics of the South. By constructing an architecture of poll taxes, literacy tests designed to be impossible to pass, long wait times and arcane laws, African Americans were effectively barricaded from exercising their democratic right. If none of these tactics succeeded in blocking voters, voter intimidation and the terror of lynching did. Nearly one hundred years after that, in 1960 amidst the Cold War, even after one million African-Americans had fought in World War II against fascism and persecution overseas, only 3% of African-Americans were registered to vote.

However, these restrictions were not only put on African Americans or limited to the South. The wave of anti-Asian hate that we are seeing today can be traced back to racist policies such as the US Chinese Exclusion Act designed to bar Chinese immigrants in 1882, and the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Directly in relation to voter suppression, the Fifteenth Amendment was not ratified in 1870 in California and Oregon, as politicians worried about the impact Chinese immigrants would have as they rose in the electorate. Womens’ suffrage was only guaranteed one hundred years ago, with the seventy year long movement culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment deemed poll taxes to be unconstitutional. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment expanded rights further, changing the voting age from 21 to 18, after young soldiers of the Vietnam War challenged that if they were “old enough to fight, they were old enough to vote''. The bravery of civil rights activists finally won the battle for voting rights for all with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, known as the “crown jewel of American democracy”. The reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act that was once unequivocally bipartisan has now become politicized and partisan and the Shelby County v. Holder landmark ruling in 2013 invalidated a key part of voting rights, opening the floodgates for states to make their own voter suppression laws. Though enormous progress has been made, the specific and intentional framework that silenced entire voting blocs for most of our nation’s history continues to work today.

Gerrymandering, poll closure, strict voter ID laws, and intentional untraining and underfunding of resources continue to be modern forms of voter suppression that disproportionately affect minorities. In addition, though it is seemingly innocuous, voter purging—used to keep voter rolls and data up to date by cancelling registrations of those who are no longer eligible— can become a tactic of voter suppression when voters are removed from the rolls, disenfranchising eligible voters with no notification. In some states, hundreds of thousands of voters have been disenfranchised this way by government error. These systemic flaws are amplified by the use of the Electoral College, an institution with its own racist history, which gives a few thousand individual votes in critical locations the power to decide the future of our nation. Despite voter fraud being virtually nonexistent, in an age where it is hard for many to distinguish between fact and fiction, recent efforts to undermine election integrity and sow distrust have been detrimental to our democracy. We are still feeling the reverberations of disinformation campaigns like “Stop the Steal” and others that incited the Capitol riots, with nearly 40% of the country unsure of whether the 2020 presidential race was legitimate.

Congress’ response to this, the For the People Act (also known as H.R. 1), may be a crucial step in restoring some Americans' trust in our voting system, and a larger faith and belief in our system of government. The bill expands voting access through same day voter registration, makes election day a federal holiday, limits gerrymandering through the installation of independent redistricting commissions and pushes for greater transparency in political spending. Though Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans are willing to portray H.R. 1 as a partisan power grab at the expense of our democracy, polls show the bill has 67% popularity even in today’s polarized world. And it’s not surprising— making voting easier and more accessible, while restricting billionaires and corporations from secretly buying influence in our elections is a common sense solution. But with rules like the filibuster, representatives can silently kill reform bills in Congress and completely ignore their constituents beliefs. And as electorates shift, politicians have two choices: develop solutions that can appeal to a more diverse base and build multi-racial collisions, or just block those voters.

Disenfranchisement causes disillusionment. When voters are being dissuaded, stalled or outright barred from using their guaranteed democratic right, our politicians are not representative of America. When we don’t act on the intentions of our populace, social and economic disparity grows and the decisions being made about the future of our nation are not in our mutual best interest. We cannot acknowledge the racist roots of our country if we do not have representatives that reflect our electorate. In our democratic process, whose votes are getting counted tells a larger story of whose voice matters. Multiculturalism is at the heart of America’s strength, creativity and future. Asian-Americans or any other racial group should not have to deal with the violence and vitriol, fear for their safety, or prove their patriotism. If racism and xenophobia are manifestations of fearing what we don’t see in ourselves, then that begins with meaningful representation in school curriculums and the media. In the simplest terms—representation matters.

The struggle for voter rights can be traced as a long and bloody line drawn from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act, and it still continues today. But if we have learned anything from the past few months, it is that our democracy is fragile, and we must fight to guarantee the American dream for all without conditions and ensure that our government remains of the people, by the people and for the people.