Democracy in Crisis

In the hindsight of a crisis, the most vulnerable populations are usually mourned, but the source of that vulnerability is often forgotten. I was pretty young when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, but I remember the immediate aftermath. I felt comfortably away from the storm, sitting 500 miles north of it in Shreveport, Louisiana. But I will never forget seeing the city engulfed in water. I will never forget the response of the federal government to my home state in crisis, and I still remember those failures when I think about the issues from that storm from which Louisiana has yet to recover. 

When crisis comes, vulnerabilities are laid bare. The lessons we choose to learn from those vulnerabilities will define the next crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic stands to expose all the vulnerabilities that many people have been sounding the alarm about for years. The economic inequality and instability that has shuttered small businesses and skyrocketed unemployment. The health disparities which put certain groups at a higher risk of severe disease and death. These issues did not manifest from COVID-19. Rather, the virus is laying bare issues that have been lingering for a long time.

For myself and other voting rights advocates, there have been some pretty loud bells ringing for years. When the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, John Lewis warned that the decision would cause communities “to go back to another period.” His words echoed the sentiments of advocates across the South who knew exactly what would happen when Southern communities were left unprotected by bad actors who would do everything possible to restrict access to the ballot. As waves of restrictive voter identification laws were passed and cuts made in early voting periods, more deeply entrenching racial gerrymandering, flourished throughout the South, voting rights advocates watched in horror as reality became worse than their imagined fears. 

Bad actions usually precede consequences, but sooner or later the debt comes due. COVID-19 may lay bare the drastic consequences of the slow, deep cuts to voting rights in the South, although many have either ignored them or diminished their true impact. Those who warned about the consequences of the court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act were not wrong. As the crisis of COVID-19 comes to fold, many communities are left without mitigation strategies to ensure the safe facilitation of elections  — a direct consequence of the movement to suppress the vote. 

Unlike those who implement restrictions on the right to vote, however, COVID-19 does not discriminate. The consequences of those restrictions will not just hit its intended target — though poor and Black voters will likely experience the compounded effects of disproportionate severe illness from COVID-19 and disproportionate disenfranchisement.  The negative effect of those restrictions will reverberate across party lines, and racial and socioeconomic distinctions.

As we saw in the Wisconsin primaries, holding in-person elections without mitigation strategies can lead to disastrous results. There, poll workers, fearing their health, decided to stay home; a reduction of polling locations from the decreased number of poll workers led to long wait times of thousands of people, at the same time that the Centers for Disease Control are suggesting minimizing contact with people.

If Wisconsin is prologue, then the South’s story is already written. In a study about the costs of adjusting elections in light of COVID-19, the Brennan Center for Justice identified several considerations for voting effectively and safely. These considerations included updates to online voter registration, the implementation and expansion of mailing procedures, and increased support for in-person voting.

The South fails on all counts. Polling locations are already reduced across the region, which can increase the number of  people in line to vote on Election Day. According to one report, since 2012, polling locations have closed in two-thirds of all Louisiana parishes, one-third of all Alabama counties, and one-third of all Mississippi counties. Additionally, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi have no online voter registration. Moreover, most states in the region require some excuse to vote absentee. Those reasons usually include being sick or hospitalized, but states are only now beginning to ponder whether COVID-19 constitutes a good enough reason to mail in your ballot. In other words, you may have an excuse for getting sick from COVID-19, but merely fearing for your health may not get you your mail-in ballot, depending on the state.

Meanwhile, entrenched poverty and healthcare costs increase the risk of severe disease from COVID-19, the effects of which befall African American communities in the region with great disproportion. African Americans across the South are getting severely sick at increasingly high rates, adding an additional barrier to in-person voting for a group which faces numerous barriers already. Finally, the added burden to healthcare workers and other essential personnel during the crisis add additional uncertainty for the ability of those voters to show up on Election Day, when many are working countless hours in response to the crisis.

Answers to these immediate problems must be made and executed swiftly. Advocates across the South are working to ensure that communities in the region have a viable solution to vote while staying safe. Lawsuits are filed almost daily in the effort to compel states in the region to accommodate voters during the crisis. Many state leaders in the region, for their part, are finding it difficult to reconcile their years-long effort to suppress votes with the imperative to expand access to the electorate at a time when no one’s constituency is safe. The Kentucky legislature overrode the governor’s veto to pass voter identification laws in the middle of this crisis. Kentucky election officials, however, announced a series of mitigation strategies for the presidential primary election, which includes absentee ballot expansion. In Tennessee, voters are organizing around voter registration by phone, extended voter registration deadlines, vote by mail, among other accommodations. Meanwhile, Tennessee election officials continue to weigh their options amidst countless election administration issues which have plagued the voting process in the state.

In Louisiana, a new coalition called Louisiana Vote By Mail is pushing the state to implement no-excuse mail voting. Louisiana Vote By Mail director Cat McKinney, a graduating senior at Louisiana State University from St. Francisville, Louisiana, told me the project seeks to “make sure that voters not only can vote by mail but that all the resources necessary for them to do that are available and have been communicated.” Louisiana, which does require an excuse to vote absentee, is facing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the nation. The Louisiana Legislature passed a limited solution which would expand absentee voting to certain voters affected by the crisis, after Republican leaders rebuked the first plan.

As McKinney emphasized, “Our elections cannot constantly be in a state of emergency.” In the long term, more protections are imperative for communities to ensure the free and fair access to elections. Some solutions are already on the table, like the passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act in Congress to revive what was lost in 2013. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provides some, but not enough money to aid states in election administration. Other long-term strategies would include increased election funding at the state level, as many Southern election officials face increasingly tighter budgets; and encouraging social distancing practices by increasing, not consolidating, polling locations specifically in densely populated areas, which tend to be disproportionately populated by working-class people and people of color.

We can also look to the local activists that have been sounding alarm bells for years, and have a pretty good idea of where to start.

Perhaps more importantly, this crisis lays bare the importance of the democratic representation which has been stripped from the communities most affected by this crisis. Why does Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, a rural, pollution-raided region whose nickname defines itself, also suffer from one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in the country? Why are 46% of Kentucky residents, riddled with black lung and ravaged by a post-coal economy, considered at-risk for serious coronavirus-related illness? The fact of the matter is, bad begets bad. Residents of Cancer Alley are gerrymandered out of their opportunity to vote for officials who will help them mitigate the effects of environmental racism. Appalachian states like Kentucky and Tennessee are still fighting voting rights advocates over voter identification and voter registration restrictions. Elections are literally life or death.

In thinking about this crisis, I consider the words of W.E.B. DuBois, who warned us a long time ago. Speaking about the short-lived Freedman’s Bureau, and “work it did not do because it could not,” I think about the work we can do if we choose not to let the mistakes of the past define the future.  In the South, this public health crisis gives us another grim, broad view of the systemic failures which result from the failure of a fully democratic electoral process. Like many of us will never forget the lessons we failed to learn after Katrina, I hope we cease to let the past be the prologue in the current crisis. As the coronavirus plagues our region, we cannot forget that we face a crisis of democracy.