By Julia Schwed ‘21, Editor-in-Chief 

It is no secret that there have long been efforts to disenfranchise people of color in the United States. For years, these efforts primarily were focused on making it more difficult for people of color to cast their votes. One of the tactics that has been used in several states is the requirement that an eligible voter produce government issued photo identification in order to vote. As the state legislatures know when passing these requirements, they disproportionately prevent people of color from being able to vote. According to the ACLU, “Minority voters disproportionately lack ID. Nationally, up to 25% of African American citizens of voting age lack government-issued photo ID, compared to only 8% of whites.” Another common tactic has been to reduce the number of voting machines and polling places in districts that have large non-white populations, leading to long lines that discourage voting. Other voter suppression tactics have included making it more difficult to register, limiting voter registration drives, eliminating early voting, and disinformation campaigns.

This year we have seen a new weapon in the arsenal of voter suppression. Instead of just trying to prevent people of color from voting, there has been an active effort to disqualify votes legally cast by people of color in this country. When it became clear that President Trump had lost the election, his campaign began to launch attacks on the election results in several key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. Trump’s team has attempted to throw out hundreds of thousands of legally-cast votes in cities with predominantly non-white populations, such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta. For example, in Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit, the board that certifies the election originally deadlocked because the two Republican members voted against certification. One of the members went so far as to propose certifying the results in “communities other than the city of Detroit,” which are predominantly white communities. After the two Republican members dropped their opposition and voted to certify the results, as they were required to do by law, President Trump called them. Nobody knows exactly what was said, but following the phone call both members tried to rescind their certification votes. Although this was unsuccessful, and a few days later the Michigan Board of Canvassers voted to certify the state’s election results, it highlights the lengths Trump was willing to go to in order to suppress minority votes. Similarly, the Trump campaign attempted to throw out the votes in the city of Milwaukee, which is 58% black and Latinx, while leaving the votes in the predominantly white Milwaukee suburbs undisturbed. As the mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett, stated, “We are absolutely witnessing in real time an effort to disenfranchise people of color throughout Milwaukee County.”

President Trump and his legal team have argued that the votes in these cities should be discarded because of widespread fraud. For example, on November 18th, Trump tweeted, “In Detroit there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan.” In fact, as Trump’s team surely knew, the most recent census shows that 650,000 people live in Detroit, and there were about 250,000 votes cast in that city. In the three weeks since the election, Trump’s legal team and other Republicans have filed over thirty lawsuits in six swing states and have failed to establish even a single case of fraud, much less the widespread fraud Trump continues to allege in his tweets. A recent decision by Judge Brann in Philadelphia, who happens to be a lifelong Republican and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, captures the outrageousness of Trump’s actions: “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption . . . That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations . . . unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter.”     

While Trump’s attempt to disenfranchise people of color by throwing out their votes has completely failed in court, his attack on the rights of people of color in this country cannot be ignored. As Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, stated, this attack is “a return to very blatant Jim Crow tactics.” In the words of Judge Brann, “Our people, laws and institutions demand more.”