ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL
Students of political despair (a popular field these days) might consider the case of Robert Parris Moses. He was a twenty-six-year-old high-school math teacher in New York City, when, in 1961, he set off, alone, to register African-American voters in Mississippi. At the time, fewer than seven per cent of eligible African-Americans in the state were registered. Local officials kept the number low by means of literacy tests, poll taxes, and violence—aimed at those trying to register and, particularly, at those seeking to register others. They included Moses and a small band of colleagues in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who joined him. He was beaten repeatedly, once nearly to death. A quiet, almost serene figure, he came to exemplify a special kind of civil-rights worker, who, as Taylor Branch wrote, in “Parting the Waters,” “chose to isolate himself deep behind the lines of segregation for years at a time, armed only with nonviolence.”
Moses understood that the franchise is the foundation of democracy, and, more than half a century later, that right is again under threat, often in the same places (mostly in the South) and always for the same reason (so that those in power can stay there). What makes the current controversy so dispiriting is the sense that the issue should have been settled by now. But, given the centrality of voting to our system of government, elections will always be battlegrounds, and votes are the weapons.
Some, though, are offering the wrong lesson about voting rights in this year’s Presidential election. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin—more than two and a half million votes—but, under the baleful metrics of our Electoral College, the outcome was not especially close. Donald Trump gained surprising victories in the northern Midwest, and his margins in the dispositive states are well outside the range where recounts, which almost never result in a change of more than five hundred votes, might make a difference. Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Wisconsin by 22,177, and Pennsylvania by 70,638. Still, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, has launched a successful fund-raising drive, collecting almost seven million dollars from grieving Americans, to underwrite official recounts. Wisconsin’s is under way, although lawyers supporting Trump are trying to stop the effort in all three states.
Stein’s demands for a recount reflect the same narcissism as her candidacy, whose primary function was to help Trump win. (Her roughly one per cent of the national vote included more than enough votes to swing two of the three states to Clinton.) Now she has exploited legitimate questions about interference by Russia, which, it seems, organized or backed a hacking operation that involved the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. This drew a curiously passive response from the Obama Administration, but there remains no evidence that Russia or any other outside force systematically intervened or altered the result in any state. The recounts will only give Trump an opportunity to claim victory again.
More important, they have turned attention away from the real voting-rights scandal of 2016. This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.
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In the words of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which, before the election, struck down some of the changes instituted by North Carolina, “Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.” Likewise, a federal court in Wisconsin rejected some of the changes in voting rules there, but federal courts can’t police every aspect of voting rights. Ultimately, the states determine such issues as early and absentee voting, photo-identification requirements, and the locations and hours of polling places.
It’s difficult to count uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of the voter-suppression measures. In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots. (The G.O.P. likes some forms of I.D. better than others. In Texas, a gun permit works; student identification does not.) In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012. To put it another way, Clinton received forty-three thousand fewer votes in that county than Barack Obama did—a number that is nearly double Trump’s margin of victory in all of Wisconsin. The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election. 
The challenge of reversing these initiatives is formidable, not least because the President-elect also apparently believes in the myth of widespread voter fraud. (He tweeted recently, and falsely, that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”) Eric Holder, who did much to protect voting rights as Attorney General, will be joined by President Obama in a project to preserve Democratic and minority power in the legislative redistricting that will follow the 2020 census—a valuable project, if a daunting one.
The current situation is not nearly as bleak as the one that Bob Moses confronted. Eventually, the power of perseverance, and the unifying idea of the right to vote in a democracy, brought him a series of unlikely triumphs, culminating, in 1965, in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But the Shelby County case, and the backlash it both reflected and accelerated, reminds us that the struggle for the right to vote, and the need to follow Moses, may never end. ♦