Florida is, once again, in an election debacle that is straining the bonds of credibility and democracy. Governor Rick Scott has actually called in the state police to investigate “voter fraud” (none was found), then ordered the voting machines impounded in Broward county, all to protect his precarious lead in the US Senate race. A judge, however, emphatically blocked that last command. Senator Marco Rubio, meanwhile, has joined the chorus of those asserting, without any evidence, that something is rotten in Broward county. And Donald Trump has, well, just been Trump. Going so far as to demand that the Republicans be declared victors even before the legal deadline for votes, including those mailed in from military members stationed abroad, to be received and counted.

As acrimonious as the 2018 election in Florida has become – as the Republicans seek to discredit the recount – democracy’s wound actually goes much deeper.

The US has consistently been comfortable with the veneer of democracy – the performance of an election – rather than the actual substance. Recounts, for example, can only capture those votes that managed to get into the ballot box.

But how does a democracy count the votes that were deliberately silenced in the face of widespread voter suppression?

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This question has arisen repeatedly and the official answer, regardless of whether the disfranchisement was blatant or subtle, has been at best disappointing and, more often, debilitating.

In 1946, black veterans were returning from fighting Nazis and fascists and were determined to experience for themselves the democracy that they had waged war to secure for Europeans and Asians. Coming home to the United States, they wanted to vote. Mississippian and rabid white supremacist Theodore Bilbo, who was running for re-election to the US Senate, however, had other ideas. He urged “every red-blooded white man to … use the tar and feathers and don’t forget the matches” to ensure “that no nigger votes”.

Duly incited, the violence rained down on blacks as Bilbo won the all-important primary in a one-party state. A group of African Americans then petitioned the US Senate to unseat Bilbo because, during the election, armed white vigilantes had threatened to kill blacks trying to vote, officials had refused to register African Americans, and other forms of intimidation had clearly discouraged “enough blacks from voting to affect the outcome of the primary”, where only 200,000 votes were probably cast. This was particularly important because in a state with 350,000 voting age-eligible African Americans, only 5,000 were registered and barely half of them were able to vote.

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Yet, even when directly confronted with virulent, obvious disfranchisement, the US Senate stalled its way into a stalemate. That august body could not come to a consensus that an election was illegitimate, stolen even, because a candidate and state laws had deliberately blocked American citizens from voting. Bilbo maintained his seat although he eventually ended up on paid medical leave until he died of mouth cancer.

And while 1946 might sound like ancient American history – at least pre-civil rights movement – there still is no real process to reckon with the electoral consequences and results of systematic efforts to keep black voters from the polls.

The Florida 2000 election, for example, is best remembered for flawed ballots, hanging chads and a short-circuited recount that handed the presidency to George W Bush. Yet, Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s purge of 58,000 alleged felons from the voting list was decisive.

In 1868, coming out of the civil war, Florida had enacted a permanent felony disfranchisement law as a way to criminalize African Americans and then strip them of their rights. By 2000, the law was still in effect and loaded with all of the racial biases of an unreconstructed Confederacy. As Ari Berman reported, although blacks were 11% of the state’s population in 2000, they comprised 44% of those purged on Harris’s list. A subsequent study found that 12,000 Floridians were not supposed to be on that list at all. The US Civil Rights Commission followed with an analysis that calculated that of those illegally purged, more than 4,700 African Americans were likely Democratic candidate Al Gore voters. But, because voter suppression and its resulting stillborn votes are like ghosts that haunt American democracy, Bush carried Florida by 537 votes.

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This year’s midterm in the Sunshine state has that same haunting feel. A recently passed grassroots-generated ballot initiative will restore the voting rights of 1.4 million returning citizens with felony convictions. But they weren’t able to vote in 2018 and, equally important, Governor Scott had seen to that. He balked at a court order this spring to open up the voting rights restoration process that his administration had throttled down considerably from the one used previously by his predecessor. And, even for those who were lucky enough to receive their rights via Scott’s byzantine process, his administration skewed the results overwhelmingly against blacks and toward Republicans in ways not seen in nearly 50 years.

Therefore, as the battle rages in Florida with no one really talking about the consequences of and inability to count suppressed votes, the US electoral system simply ambles along as if it’s never seen anything like this before while continuing to reward those who strip American citizens of their voting rights. If this continues, democracy will soon be a ghost, too.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory university. She is the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.



