In the beforetimes, when the coronavirus was just a gleam in a pangolin’s eye, I took in the odd concert. Richmond has a wonderful venue, the National, where I’ve attended many shows. The National has a sister venue – the NorVa – and I found myself in Portsmouth-Norfolk in May 2019 for a double bill: The Last Internationale (awesome!) and Tom Morello (transcendent!). It was an evening of music to move my pale white booty along with politics to take to the street. Check both out, if you haven’t.
While in town, I sampled the region’s local paper, The Virginian-Pilot. A letter in it defended the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 census. The newspaper took a pass on the letter I sent. The census remains vexing. The worst efforts to skew it – the citizenship question, President Id Personified’s call to purge the undocumented from the numbers used for reapportionment of legislative seats – were thwarted; nevertheless, the pandemic likely ensured a flawed count that will serve right-wing interests.
Maurice F. Conner, “Citizenship Status Is Needed,” The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_6b097382-772e-11e9-bb92-cbbec9217c7c.html).
Maurice Connor (The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12) rightly calls for Congress to address immigration reform and decries President Trump’s divisive rhetoric but he misreads the reasons why the citizenship question will potentially reappear in the 2020 Census after having been deemed unnecessary and counterproductive more than a half century ago.
There is no legal requirement that the census ask about citizenship. The Constitution mandates that the census count people, not citizens, because the nation has always been home to multitudes of non-citizens, documented and undocumented. The Census Bureau estimates that the question will reduce participation by non-citizens by 5.1 percent and cause an undercount of 6.5 million.[1]
Far more troubling is the probability that the resurrection of the citizenship question was politically motivated. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who initially asserted that the question arose from a Justice Department request, conceded last October that he had discussed the matter with then Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who encouraged Ross to contact Kris Kobach, [2] the Kansas secretary of state infamous for efforts to disqualify voters and for leadership of Trump’s farcical voter fraud commission. Beyond any dishonesty by Ross in congressional testimony, the question’s origin smacks at best of an attempt at demographic gerrymandering and at worst of the pursuit of alt-right, anti-immigrant policies through the vehicle of the census.
The Supreme Court should not permit Trump and his minions to corrupt yet another institution by politically weaponizing it.
[1] Dana Milbank, “Saving White Hegemony in Four Little Steps,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A21 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-census-case-presents-how-to-preserve-white-hegemony-in-four-easy-steps/2019/04/23/ef2b6712-660b-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html).
[2] Glenn Thrush and Adam Liptack, “Wilbur Ross Changes Story on Discussion of Citizenship Question in Census,” The New York Times, 12 October 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/politics/wilbur-ross-commerce-census-citizenship.html).
Nearly a year after the 2016 election, it emerged that Virginia was among a score of states whose voting systems had been assailed by Russian hackers. The Commonwealth emerged from this unscathed. That was the good news. The bad news in my view was that the Russians represented the least of the concerns about voting going forward. This letter to The Richmond Free Press responds to this news and briefly catalogues the GOP’s efforts not just to discourage eligible voters from pulling the lever but also to excise segments from the electorate with surgical position. Some of the news from that time now seems prophetic, especially the poll suggesting that half of GOP voters would accept suspension of the 2020 election if The Fabulist in Chief falsely declared that fraudulent voting would make a fair election impossible.
Ronald E. Carrington, “Voting Systems in Va., 20 Other States Targeted Hackers in 2016,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 September 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/sep/29/voting-systems-va-20-other-states-targeted-hackers/).
The good news reported by Mr. Carrington – failure by probable Russian hackers to affect Virginia’s 2016 election results – should not blind the Commonwealth’s voters to the perhaps more insidious threat to the ballot box from within, conservative efforts to disenfranchise segments of the electorate.
President Trump’s narcissistic, delusional assertion that millions of “illegal” voters deprived him victory in the popular vote last November spurred his empanelment of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, its very name a paragon of Orwellian doublespeak. Mr. Trump placed at its head Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a man whose name is synonymous with voter suppression and who in 2016, in dogged pursuit of the voter-fraud unicorn, tossed triple the number of ballots in Kansas as in demographically similar states (The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 September 2017). Mr. Kobach, moreover, champions the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a project ostensibly aimed to improve accuracy of voter rolls but believed to target minority voters disproportionately.
Fear that Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s electoral “vision” will spread nationwide is not unfounded as the notion of carving demographic slices from the electorate gains traction in conservative circles. The loathsome Ann Coulter’s call to rescind the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and raise the voting age to thirty seems less like fringe lunacy when considered in the context of an August poll in which more than half of GOP voters would support, at Mr. Trump’s behest, suspension of the 2020 election because of his false claim of widespread illegal voting (Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” The Washington Post, 10 August 2017 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/]).
The backdrop to Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s undercutting of confidence in elections is the effort in many GOP-controlled states to discourage participation by traditionally Democratic constituencies – minorities, the young, the poor – by restricting early voting, imposing needless voter-identification requirements, and providing inadequate voting equipment for urban precincts. The GOP, furthermore, strives to make Democratic votes worth less through partisan gerrymandering unprecedented in scope and efficacy, an abuse now under review by the US Supreme Court. These antidemocratic measures threaten to overwhelm commendable attempts to expand the electorate, such as Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of the franchise to ex-felons, a restriction at its inception largely conceived to constrain minority voting.
The ballot box remains the best avenue toward social and economic justice. A vigilant and aggressive defense of voting is now especially urgent.