The Vote: Rigging Elections, Stacking the deck, Subverting American Democracy and Defying Demographics

The discussion seminar course will explore the calculated efforts to ensure that political power in the U.S. stay in the hands of those in power against all demographic odds and projections. It is often said, particularly now, that the right to vote is what keeps the United States from descending into autocracy or one-party rule. Yet, the right to vote is not protected directly in the Constitution and American history is filled with examples of successful ways for those in power to keep and entrench their power. 

Among the topics we will cover are:

• Historical grounding: Origins limiting the vote to property-owning White men; generations of denying voting rights to women, slaves and felons; poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and other Jim Crow laws; Bush v. Gore; and the end of Voting Rights Act protections against racial discrimination in voting.
• Immigration: Selective limits and bans on lawful migration into the U.S., reducing the numbers and types of people allowed to enter and stay in the country and become citizens who can vote.
• Voter suppression: Techniques used by states, ostensibly to address potential vote fraud, such as requiring photo IDs; purging voter rolls when registered voters don’t vote in consecutive elections; using unverified crosscheck lists to create the impression of illegal duplicate voting; limiting early voting; and closing targeted polling places, all of which tend to disproportionately impact minorities, African-American communities, lower-income residents, majority-Hispanic districts, and senior citizens.
• Census: Every ten years, the census bureau does its most intensive count of the U.S. population. The data is used to draw district boundaries for the purposes of determining Congressional and state legislative maps, and one issue for this coming 2020 census is the citizenship question, which we will dissect to understand the relationship between the census, demographic reality and elections to come.
• Redistricting and gerrymandering: To date, it is legal for politicians to draw district boundaries for partisan political purposes, but not for racial reasons. The Supreme Court recently sidestepped a decision on whether it should continue to be legal. One consequence of political gerrymandering is it allows for those in power who draw and approve the redistricting maps to further entrench their political ideologies and parties.
• The Russians are coming. They came, they saw and they corrupted. Why stop now?