Today’s voter suppression in the South can trace a line back to the Jim Crow laws and lynchings of the 19th and 20th centuries

The question of who votes is central to democratic politics. For obvious reasons, political parties want their supporters to show up on Election Day, which is why many spend significant time and resources on get out the vote operations. Just as obviously, it helps a party if more of their opponents’ supporters don’t go to the polls.

As a result, parties in government have sometimes attempted to suppress voting by their opponents. Broadly, governments prefer to use centralized, legal approaches to suppress voting by, for example, passing laws that make it harder for their opponents to vote. Laws have the benefit of usually being followed, are by definition “legal”, and are usually reliably enforced by bureaucratic agents of the state, such as the police. But sometimes governments do not have the internal political capacity to enact such laws or the bureaucratic capacity to implement them. CONT.

Brad Epperly (U. of South Carolina), LSE USAPP