The Hidden History of the War on Voting

Who Stole Your Vote—and How to Get It Back

Thom Hartmann

• Editorial: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781523087808
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

The New York Times –bestselling author explores America's history with voter disenfranchisement and how to ensure everyone has a voice in this democracy. In today's America, only a slim majority of people register to vote, and a large percentage of registered voters don't bother to show up: Donald Trump was elected by only twenty-sixpercent of eligible voters. Unfortunately, this is not a bug in our system, it's a feature. America's #1 progressive radio host Thom Hartmann unveils the strategies and tactics that conservative elites in this country have used, from the foundation of the Electoral College to the latest voter ID laws, to protect their interests by preventing "the wrong people"—such as the poor, women, and people of color—from voting while making it more convenient for the wealthy and white. But he also lays out a wide variety of simple, commonsense ways that we the people can fight back and reclaim our right to rule through the ballot box.

Praise for The Hidden History of the War on Voting

"Hartmann's history of voter suppression in America is necessary information given current news about voter registration purges and redistricting....A particularly timely topic for an election year, and anyone who is seriously concerned about the survival of American democracy will want to read this book and apply its lessons." — Booklist

"An indispensable manual for waging—and winning—civic warfare.Use it!" —David Bender, Political Director, Progressive Voices Network

PART ONE

The Hidden History of the Vote in America

Power to the South: The Three-Fifths Compromise

As the drama of writing the Constitution for a new nation was going on during the summer of 1787 in Independence Hall in Philadelphia (then the home of the Pennsylvania Legislature), a different kind of drama was playing out in the streets of that city.

It was, according to the newspapers of the day and the letters sent home from delegates to the Convention, a brutally hot, muggy, mosquito-infested summer in Philadelphia. This was during a time when the mechanisms of weather were largely unknown, and superstition was thickly merged with Christianity.

Thus, on May 5, when a boy of about five years died of an apparent heatstroke, an elderly woman in town was accused of being the witch who’d cast a spell upon him. The delegates were just arriving in town for the opening of the Constitutional Convention on May 14 and no doubt noticed, as reported on May 11 in the Pennsylvania Packet newspaper, that the good citizens of the town grabbed the woman, known only as Mrs. Korbmacher (the German word for basket maker), on one of the main streets and tried to cut open her forehead to bleed her of evil spirits.1

Mrs. Korbmacher was having none of it, and she ran through the streets with an angry mob following her. A few people spoke up on her behalf but were shouted down or threatened by the crowd. At the end of the day, though, they let her live and she escaped.

She wasn’t so lucky, however, on July 10.

That day was a hot and muggy Tuesday, and on Friday of that week, in frustration, Edmund Randolph would submit the “Three-Fifths Compromise” to break the debate between slave states, free states, small states, and large states on the question of how many members of the House of Representatives each state should have.

It fundamentally shaped the future governance of America, and shaped the Electoral College as well for the next 240-plus years.

But on July 10, they were still slugging it out. James Madison’s notes described the scene, published in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.2

The proposal put on the floor by Massachusetts’s Rufus King, a lawyer and member of the Continental Congress, was that the states should have representatives based on their potential white male voting population, which would have created a total of 65 House members.

King argued that although he didn’t want to disenfranchise the Southern slave states, they certainly didn’t have enough white citizens to justify a majority of the seats in the proposed Congress.

“The four Eastern States having 800,000 souls,” he said, according to Madison, “have ⅓ fewer representatives than the four Southern States, having not more than 700,000 souls, rating the blacks as 5 for 3.” This, he said, would upset the “Eastern states,” who would consider themselves the “subject [of] gross inequality.” While he wanted to preserve the “security of the Southern” states, there was “[n]o principle [that] would justify giving them a majority.”

The representative from Massachusetts, along with most of the other Eastern and Northern states, wanted to keep the union together with the Southern slave states, Madison noted, “but did not see how it could be done.”

This threw the Convention into chaos.

South Carolina’s Pinckney dramatically declared that if the Northern states had such a majority over the Southern states, then the slave states “will be nothing more than overseers for the Northern States.” And the Southern states had no intention of ever being under the thumb of the Northern states.

The day devolved from there.

Frustrated, they gave up the debate toward the end of the day and moved on to a series of largely typographic edits of what had already been agreed on in other areas of the Constitution.

The Racist Legacy of a Constitutional Compromise

While the delegates debated inside, outside Mrs. Korbmacher was being beaten to death by an angry and frightened mob. The heat had not relented. The mob was now sure that not only had she killed the little boy but she was trying to kill them too with the heat.

In 1787, it was widely believed among the white power structure of this country that some women were witches and that people with dark skin were lazy, stupid, incapable of feeling very much pain, and generally subhuman.

We look back on Mrs. Korbmacher’s sad story with a certain bemusement. Today, we no longer kill witches—the very idea of a woman being a “dangerous” witch is considered bizarre. But racial myths are still very much a part of the American political and social mindscape.

When a black man was elected president of the United States in 2008, almost a third of the white electorate believed that it was impossible for a black man to attain such an office by his own intellect and hard work.

Instead of winning through merit, talent, and political positions, people like Donald Trump and David Duke asserted, Barack Obama must have been a stalking horse, a Manchurian candidate, raised up out of Kenya by malevolent Muslim forces and installed as a child in Hawaii to one day rule over and destroy white America.

And this wasn’t a worldview held exclusively by a small group of white bigots.

In 2017, white supremacists—“some very good people,” as Trump said—marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “You will not replace us. . . . Jews will not replace us.” One avowed white supremacist murdered a counterprotester. Excluding the anomaly of 9/11, white supremacist terrorists killed more Americans in the previous three decades than did any other group, but police today are more likely to investigate black groups than white supremacist ones.3^,4

The Ku Klux Klan didn’t come into its own until 1865. But its progenitors, mostly in the form of the slave patrols, were terrorizing black people with enthusiasm in 1787 and continue, under other names, to do so to this day.

On the slightly cooler morning of Friday, July 13, 1787, starting from the issue of taxation, the exhausted members of the Convention considered Randolph, James Wilson, and Roger Sherman’s Three-Fifths Compromise, and it passed unanimously.5

They’d solved the problem, although they’d also set up the elections of John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, who all lost the popular vote but became president because they won the Electoral College.

The Founders Feared a Trump-like President—Which Is Why They Established the Electoral College

The founders and framers thought they could prevent somebody like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. They were wrong, and we’re still paying the price.

It’s often said that the Electoral College was brought into being to perpetuate or protect the institution of slavery, and, indeed, during the first half-century of America it gave the slave states several presidents who otherwise wouldn’t have been elected.

Most of the pro-slave-state bias of the Electoral College, however, was a function of the Three-Fifths Compromise (which, until the 1870s, gave slave states more members in the House of Representatives than called for by the size of their voting public) and the decision to give each state two US senators.

But, according to the framers of the Constitution themselves, the real reason for the Electoral College was to prevent a foreign power from placing their stooge in the White House.

Today we’re horrified by the idea that Donald Trump may truly be putting the interests of foreign governments ahead of our own, and that money and other efforts from multiple foreign entities may have helped him get elected.

It’s shocking. Many of us never took the idea seriously when the movie The Manchurian Candidate came out in 1962. “What an intriguing idea for a movie,” we thought, “but that could never happen here.”

However, this scenario was a huge deal for the founding generation. One of the first questions about any candidate for president was “Is he beholden in any way to any other government?”

At the time of the Declaration of Independence, it’s estimated that nearly two-thirds of all citizens of the American colonies favored remaining a British colony (Jimmy Carter’s novel The Hornet’s Nest is a great resource). There were spies and British loyalists everywhere, and Spain had staked out its claim to the region around Florida while the French were colonizing what is now Canada.

Foreign powers had us boxed in.

In 1775, virtually all of the colonists had familial, friendship, or business acquaintances with people whose loyalty was suspect or who were openly opposed to American independence.

It was rumored that Ben Franklin, while in Paris, was working as a spy for British intelligence, and his close associate, Edward Bancroft, actually was.6 Federalists, in particular, were wary of his “internationalist” sentiments.

Thomas Jefferson lived in France while the Constitution was drafted, and his political enemies were, even then, whispering that he had, at best, mixed loyalties (and it got much louder around the election of 1800). In response, he felt the need to protest to Elbridge Gerry, in a letter on January 26, 1799, “The first object of my heart is my own country. In that is embarked my family, my fortune, and my own existence.”7

When John Adams famously defended British soldiers who, during an anti-British riot on March 5, 1770, shot and killed Crispus Attucks and four others, he was widely condemned for being too pro-British. The issue recurred in 1798 when he pushed the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress over Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s loud objections. British spy Gilbert Barkley wrote to his handlers in London that Quakers and many other Americans considered Adams an enemy to his country.

When Adams blew up the XYZ Affair and nearly went to war with France, his political opponents circulated the rumor that he was doing it only to solidify his “manly” and “patriotic” credentials. Historian and author John Ferling, in his book A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic, writes that Adams’s anti-British rhetoric worked at changing the perception of him: “By mid-1798 he was acclaimed for his ‘manly fortitude,’ ‘manly spirited’ actions, and ‘manly independence.’”8

After the Revolutionary War, the nation was abuzz about Benedict Arnold—one of the war’s most decorated soldiers and once considered a shoo-in for high elected office—selling out to the British in exchange for money and a title.

So it fell to a fatherless man born in the West Indies to explain to Americans that the main purpose of the Electoral College was to make sure that no agent of a foreign government would ever become president.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist, no. 68, that America was so spread out, it would be difficult for most citizens/voters to get to know a presidential candidate well enough to spot a spy or traitor. But the electors—having no other governmental duty, obligation, or responsibility—would catch one.9

After all, the way the Constitution set up the Electoral College, the electors were expected to cast their votes for president reflecting the preferences of their states, but they didn’t have to. They’d all assemble in the nation’s capital and get to know the candidates, and make their own independent determinations on the character and qualities of the men running for president. They’d easily spot a foreign agent or a person with questionable sympathies.

“The most deadly adversaries” of America, Hamilton wrote, would probably “make their approaches [to seizing control of the United States] from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”

But influencing public opinion or owning a senator was nothing compared with having their man in the White House. As Hamilton wrote, “How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy [presidency] of the Union?”

But, Hamilton wrote, the framers of the Constitution “have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.”

The system they set up to protect the presidency from an agent of a foreign government was straightforward, Hamilton claimed. The choice of president would not “depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes.” Instead, the Electoral College would be made up of “persons [selected] for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.”

The electors would be apolitical, Hamilton wrote: “And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors.” This, Hamilton was certain, would eliminate “any sinister bias.”

Rather than average but uninformed voters, and excluding members of Congress who might be subject to bribery or foreign influences, the electors would select a man for president who was brave of heart and pure of soul.

“The process of election [by the Electoral College] affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Indeed, although a knave or rogue or traitor might fool enough people to ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, the Electoral College would likely ferret out such a traitor.

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the fi...