Voter suppression is nothing new in the United States, and has been experienced by BIPOC and women for three hundred years. Though white women gained the right to vote in 1920, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (or, BIPOC) still struggle with unnecessary obstacles to register and cast their votes. Some historical examples of voter suppression from the 1960s include; a complicated registration form, literacy tests and poll taxes. Black applicants had to fill out lengthy and detailed forms, and in some states, they were forced to support Clause 209, the law that kept Black and White children from attending the same school. If they did not comply, or their application was immediately denied. This policy was enforced even after the Brown vs Board of Education case in 1954 that deemed school segregation unconstitutional. Additionally, literacy tests were given to Black voters with complicated and near impossible questions like interpreting any given clause in the Mississippi Constitution. The person leading the registration was able to deny the application on the grounds that it was not a “reasonable interpretation”. As if these barriers were not difficult enough to overcome, a poll tax was enacted, requiring Black voters to pay a fee if they wanted to register. However, because of other forms of discrimination, most Black Americans held low paying jobs and were unable to afford this. “Intimidation and discriminatory voter registration requirements made it all but impossible for African Americans to exercise the right to vote.”
Though poll taxes, literacy tests, and complicated forms are in the past, “voter suppression remains a mainstay of electoral politics in the United States today.” (Johnson, Feldman). More recent examples of voter suppression include, but are not limited to; strict voter ID laws, the “exact match” clause, and purges. Strict voter ID laws require a government-issued ID to vote. This law is claimed to help prevent voter impersonation, but studies have shown that this occurring is highly unlikely. The issues with this law are that not everyone has one of these ID’s, predominantly BIPOC. For example, “Texas permits voters to use a handgun license to vote, but not a student ID from a state university. More than 80 percent of handgun licenses issued to Texans in 2018 went to white Texans, while more than half of the students in the University of Texas system are racial or ethnic minorities.” The “Exact Match” policy states that the names people used to register to vote had to perfectly match the name that had been previously approved by the government for their form of identification (ID, Birth Certificate etc). If the names did not match exactly, then the vote was not counted. In Georgia, 80% of votes that were blocked belonged to BIPOC voters (fortunately, this policy was ended in 2019). Lastly, occasionally people are removed from the list of voters because they are deemed “allegedly ineligible” in what is called ‘purges’. This is common in jurisdictions where overt racial profiling and discrimination in voting is a recurring problem. “The Supreme Court’s 2013 Voting Rights Act decision ended the requirement for those places to get permission (or “preclearance”) from the federal government before changing their voting rules” which is harmful to groups, specifically BIPOC, that are under threat of losing their right to vote. Though overt forms of voter suppression have been left in the past, it is still alive and well in the United States. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color are under threat of losing their right to vote for people and policies that affect them.
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