Historian Carol Anderson walks us via the historical past of voter suppression within the U.S. to place this second in context and illustrate how the identical playbook is getting used now.
Voting rights activists protest exterior the U.S. Supreme Courtroom because the courtroom prepares to listen to arguments in a case difficult Louisiana’s congressional map in Washington on Wednesday, October 15, 2025. (Invoice Clark/CQ-Roll Name, Inc by way of Getty Pictures)
This week, President Donald Trump requested the U.S. Supreme Courtroom to permit him to implement an govt order geared toward making it a lot more durable to vote by mail. The order would direct the Division of Homeland Safety to create “state citizenship lists” of eligible voters and require the U.S. Postal Service to ship mail-in ballots solely to individuals on these lists.
It’s a part of the president’s ongoing assaults on the election system.
Political Breakdown has been analyzing election integrity in America over the previous few weeks, and right this moment they revisit the primary episode in that collection.
Host Marisa Lagos talks with historian Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Research at Emory College and writer of “One Particular person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy.”
She stated the controversy over who will get to vote has been centered, since our founding, on the query of “who’s worthy” of voting.
Anderson stated the primary large backlash got here after the Civil Battle, when Congress handed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, “which principally stated that Black males might vote.” They usually did come out to vote: That regulation led to 33 Black males being elected to the state legislature in Georgia a yr later — then being expelled, illegally, by white lawmakers. The ensuing protests led to a bloodbath.
“You had this huge backlash to Black males voting as a result of there was this sense that they weren’t actual People. They weren’t worthy of citizenship,” Anderson stated.
Understanding that the Reconstruction Act wasn’t sufficient, Congress handed the fifteenth Modification in 1869. Clocking in at 46 phrases lengthy, it decreed: “The appropriate of residents of the USA to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the USA or by any State on account of race, coloration, or earlier situation of servitude. The Congress shall have energy to implement this text by acceptable laws.”
Anderson stated the intention was good, however the regulation in the end ushered within the Jim Crow period as as soon as once more states labored to bypass the federal regulation. Typically it was via uncooked violence and intimidation of Black voters — however typically, Anderson stated, it was additionally via what she referred to as “bureaucratic violence.”
“The states discovered, OK, we are able to’t say we don’t need Black of us to vote,” Anderson stated, so that they as an alternative crafted legal guidelines and insurance policies that by no means talked about race however had the impact of disenfranchising Black voters.
These legal guidelines included literacy and constitutional exams, which Black voters couldn’t move as a result of they’d been denied schooling, ballot taxes, and grandfather clauses that exempted males who had the suitable to vote earlier than 1867 from these numerous exams and taxes — in order that poor and illiterate white males wouldn’t be barred from voting.
“They discovered the best way to make it sound affordable, the best way to make it sound like a safety of democracy, to make a sound like they’re going for election integrity,” Anderson stated.
These legal guidelines have been typically upheld by the U.S. Supreme Courtroom underneath the guise that they didn’t point out race, Anderson stated. The blueprint was the Mississippi Plan of 1890, which pioneered lots of these Jim Crow voter suppression legal guidelines and was upheld by the courtroom as a result of its language was “colorblind.”
When it handed, Anderson stated, round 190,000 Black males have been registered to vote in Mississippi. Two years later, that quantity had dropped to eight,600.
“That’s the energy of the Mississippi Plan, huge disfranchisement,” she stated. “They knew precisely what they have been doing.”
Anderson stated issues didn’t actually begin altering till the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although there have been efforts within the subsequent many years to restrict voting entry. That features the 1993 Motor Voter Act, which made voter registration simpler but in addition included a provision requiring states to scrub up their voter rolls. Anderson stated it resulted in tens of hundreds of eligible voters being scrubbed from the rolls in largely Southern states — and unable to vote in key races, together with the 2000 presidential contest.
“And who’re these individuals? We all know who they’re by statistics, by analysis. They’re overwhelmingly younger individuals, poor individuals and minorities,” she stated.
That brings us to the trendy period, and Trump’s assaults on the 2020 elections. Keep tuned for extra episodes on election integrity in America.
