Voting Rights: Seeing Is Believing
Disenfranchisement should be more prominently featured in our political discourse. But the challenge of elevating the issue is that there’s nothing to “see”. The challenge for activists is telling a story of regressive policy when images that motivate action are hard to come by.
Drive through sections of the Bay Area. When you see city blocks full of homeless folks trying to survive in camping tents, economic inequality is no longer an abstraction. You can see it.
Log into social media. When you see iPhone footage of an unarmed black person being brutalized by white cops, systemic racism is no longer an abstraction. You can see it. The visceral experience of being in or seeing a hurricane or wildfire tends to reliably provoke discussions of climate change policy, and so forth.
Indeed, the turning point for the civil rights movement — and what led to the voting rights regime we have today — wasn’t a speech. It was the jarring visuals of Bloody Sunday. Up to that point in the movement, it just wasn’t on people’s radar. Actually watching television footage of Alabama state troopers beating young black people on Edmund Pettis bridge — cheered by segregationists waving confederate flags — shocked the conscience, changed the conversation, and forced the issue.
Unfortunately, people have to see things in order to feel their importance in a meaningful way. It’s something to be mindful of.
Understanding how vote dilution happens is straightforward. Legal scholars have defined two approaches: packing and cracking. As the name suggests, packing is cramming as many minority voters into a single jurisdiction as possible. The effect is that the target jurisdiction becomes saturated, leaving fewer votes to spread around in adjacent jurisdictions. Packing is how Austin, Texas has one Democrat and five Republicans in Congress.
Cracking is the inverse. Legislators will target area where minority voters are geographically concentrated and dilute through division. Not sizable enough to compete or influence policy in any of the political subdivisions, a “cracked” community loses the benefit of a unified voice.
Returning to the power of imagery, I’m not aware of a more egregious example of cracking at the moment than in North Carolina (although I’m sure there are others). North Carolina A&T is the largest historically black university in the country. Its expansive campus is home to over 12,000 students.
Laurel Road runs north-south, cutting through the middle of campus. It also serves as a political boundary separating senate district six and thirteen. So, a student can wake up in one district, and on the walk to class cross into the other. Hypothetically speaking, if someone had the goal of diminishing the ability of black voters to influence state policy, this would be an effective way to do it. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
So often, though, discrimination in this context doesn’t give us anything to look at. Voting policy is technical and bureaucratic. It’s very hard to make causal connections. But they’re there, and the onus is on advocates to tell the right story.
