By Carl Davidson
LeftLinks Weekly for Sept 20, 2024
In our country, elections are administered on the local level. In most cases, this is done by one of our 3180 or so counties.
But since some counties are very large—Los Angeles County has over 5 million residents—further subdivisions are needed, resulting in some 10,000 local government bodies administering local elections.
These local bodies are subdivided again into precincts, and there are about 200,000 of them. The precinct is where we all go to cast our ballots, in person or otherwise.
One problem emerges immediately. Elections in the U.S. are mainly defined by state laws. There is not, for example, a national right to vote. (There are two Amendment against discrimination by race or sex) Instead there are 50 state-level rights to vote, and while some are similar, there are 50 sets of voting rights and 50 sets of state laws governing how counties and their precincts run their elections.
In Pennsylvania, for example, you have to declare a party registration to vote in that party’s primary elections. In Illinois, however, any registered voters can show up at primary elections and ask for the ballot of any party.
Here is a critical point. At the end of election day, each precinct counts its ballots, discarding any it considers spoiled or otherwise invalid. A county-level election official then ‘canvasses’ all the precincts and tallies the results, and reports them to the chief state election official, often the state attorney general.
The tallying is called ‘certification,’ and it is primarily ceremonial, simply gathering reported results and adding them up. The state then announces the outcome. If a particular race’s outcome is unusually close, a recount may be demanded, or, in some cases, a recount is done automatically. At this point, other challenges may also be alleged, which a state court will quickly decide. In 2020, for example, Trump allies lodged 66 challenges across several states, and all of them were dismissed as without merit, even in Republican-dominated states and their courts.
The above is a three-paragraph summary lesson in what our high schools used to teach as ‘Civics Class.’ We usually learned, if not told directly, that this was how things were supposed to work, not necessarily how they actually worked.
The greatest turmoil over voting in U.S. history was in the period of post-Civil-War Reconstruction and its violent KKK overthrow in 1876, replacing the South's newly founded 'abolition democracy' with the ‘White Redeemer’ counter-revolution that held sway with Jim Crow for many following decades.
During Reconstruction, when Black men had the right to vote, some 2000 Black officials were elected across ten states, and sixteen of them were elected to the U.S. Congress. After 1876 and continuing up to 1965, African Americans in the ‘Solid South’ were prevented from voting or even registering to vote by violence or other threats to their well-being. Mississippi even designated a statewide ‘white primary’ that excluded even the handful of registered Blacks from taking part. In many cases, the same measures against Blacks were also used to exclude ‘disloyal’ poor whites from voting.
In the North measures were not quite as severe, but Blacks were often either gerrymandered to ‘water down’ their votes, or confined into segregated residential areas with permanent minority status. From the Civil War up until 1932, nearly all votes by African Americans, where they were able to cast their ballots, went to whay they continued to see as the Republican Party of Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens and Frederick Douglass. The dire economic conditions of the Great Depression caused the major realignment of Blacks in the North into the Democratic party of FDR. In the ‘Solid South,’ black votes remained of little consequence. Dixie’s Democrat White supremacy ruled with racist law combined with terror and murder. In the same period, similar voter suppression or denial was used against Mexican Americans and Native Peoples in the Southwest and Chinese Americans in California.
But voting changed after WW2. The Southern civil rights movement and the Black Revolt of the 1960s-1970s can aptly be called our ‘Second Reconstruction.’ It also included La Raza Unita Party in Texas, and the rise of farmworkers in California, among others. Its victories that changed voting and election outcomes since then were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he lamented that he was ceding the South to the GOP for generations to come. His assessment was correct, but full of some irony. LBJ was known as ‘Landslide Lyndon’ in his first election to Congress in 1937, where his tally count was over 90% of the results. The 90%, however, saw considerable voter suppression. In one precinct, at the end of the voting day, several hundred voters all voted in alphabetical order, and signed with the same pen and the same handwriting. LBJ’s campaign manager, in charge of such things, was his friend Abe Fortas. Fortas was later rewarded with a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Similar last-ditch efforts were used in other, much tighter races. Mayor Daley made sure JFK took Illinois to defeat Nixon with what was called ‘the graveyard vote.’ And Jeb Bush purged 20,000 Black registered voters in Florida, getting George W. Bush elected over Al Gore by a handful of votes backed up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
There are two morals and one vital ongoing lesson to this story. One is that the U.S. electoral system, with all its class and racialized structures, especially the Electoral College, is the most backward of all the ‘bourgeois democracies’ of the ‘advanced’ West. We shouldn’t wish it on anyone.
The second moral is the electoral system changes, primarily due to mass struggle, but also due to economic crises and demographic change, and can be sometimes be put to positive use. Harold Washington's Chicago mayoral victory in 1983 and Jesse Jackson’s Democratic primary campaigns in 1984 and 1988 were prominent examples, paving the way for Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012.
As is often the case in our country, positive change is met with reactionary backlash. George Wallace’s campaigns and Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ helped reverse our Second Reconstruction. And if Jesse’s campaigns and Obama’s victories were the first signs of a Third Reconstruction, the election of Trump in 2016 was the backlash.
Despite Trump's defeat by Biden in 2020, Trump has gone on to completely purge the GOP of all conservatives unwilling to pledge fealty to him and to surrender to his fascist bloc. Now together with Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance, Trump is openly calling for racist pogroms on a mass scale. Vance explicitly calls their efforts as a bringing back to power ‘Southern Bourbons,’ a prettified term for the old slavocracy's descendants. It would mean the reversal of all gains made by workers and all the oppressed going back at least until 1898 and Plessy vs. Ferguson’s legalized apartheid.
So what is the ongoing lesson? Look at the beginning of this argument. Our elections are won or lost in each of 10,000 voting district subdivisions. We have to maximize our relatively passive anti-fascist majority in each of them, and see that their votes are properly canvassed and certified. The Trump camp is training people to gum up these local works every way they can. But everywhere they are, we have to place our people to challenge and stymy their anti-democratic efforts to suppress our votes. It’s time to sign up as poll watchers, precinct judges and any other positions we need to fill. As a left, we can’t do it alone. But with a wide common project, we can. We can tell the truth about our elections, and we always should. But we can also win them.
We are still a Confederacy!
I've made my peace and I'm choosing peace this Nov.
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