Black voters turned out in Alabama — despite suppression

  When it came time to cast her ballot in the presidential election last fall, Dechauna Jiles voted at the First Assembly of God in Dothan, Alabama. But when she returned to her polling place last week to vote in Alabama’s special election, poll workers told her she was “inactive.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Jiles.

  The African-American woman had always voted at the First Assembly of God.

  Jiles told ThinkProgress’ Kira Lerner that it would be a “dishonor to her family” not to vote. Her parents, she said, grew up two blocks from the historic 16th Street Baptist Church, a rallying point for civil rights activists during the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963. And it was the scene of one of the era’s most heinous acts of terror when Klansmen set off a powerful bomb on a Sunday morning – killing four little girls – in September of that year.

  In fact, Doug Jones, the winner in the Alabama Senate election, successfully prosecuted two of the Klansmen nearly 40 years after the bombing.

  But on Dec. 12, workers told Jiles that she could only cast a “provisional” ballot, one that would not be counted unless she drove to another precinct to update her information. Six other voters, Jiles told Lerner, were told the same thing.

  "It’s not that we’re not showing up to vote — we’re being suppressed,” said Jiles.

  We were concerned going into the special election that Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill’s decision to inactivate 340,000 voters a month before the August primary — and his recent threat about jailing crossover voters — would have a chilling effect on turnout.

  Merrill said he was updating the voter rolls to reflect address changes.

  But black voters in Alabama are right to be suspicious. The state has a long history of making it harder for them to cast their ballot. Dorothy Guilford, now 97, remembers taking a literacy test to become eligible and standing in long lines to pay her poll tax.

  “Now that, I think, discouraged a lot of people, the long lines, because so many had to go back to work,” Guilford said.

  The Voting Rights Act put an end to such overtly discriminatory measures, but the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 to gut key provisions of the Act opened the door to new forms of discrimination.

  In January of this year, the U.S. Department of Transportation concluded that Alabama — which requires a photo ID to vote — disproportionately hurt black voters in 2015 when it closed 31 driver’s license offices, including offices in eight of the 10 counties with the highest proportion of black residents.

  “All you had to do was look at a map to see it,” wrote AL.com’s Kyle Whitmore.

  Thanks to the federal probe, some of the offices have since reopened. But it wasn’t the last attack by an Alabama lawmaker on the right to vote.

  Just before last year’s presidential election, Merrill criticized automatic voter registration as the “sorry and lazy way out,” claiming that “just because you turned 18 doesn’t give you the right to do anything.”

  Merrill’s comments were not only ignorant — the 26th Amendment gives citizens who turn 18 precisely the right to vote — but part and parcel of a broader campaign to suppress minority voters.

  We’ve seen it in President Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud, in lawmakers’ purges of voter rolls, in lawsuits against poor counties for out-of-date voter rolls, and in gerrymandered districts.

  We saw it in Alabama on Dec. 12, when voters across the state reported misleading ballots, police intimidation at the polls, and text messages erroneously telling them that their polling locations had changed.

  “It’s important for everybody to be able to vote and let their choice be known,” Dorothy Guilford told the Southern Poverty Law Center shortly after the VRA was abolished.

  Without its protections, systematic voter suppression – not voter fraud – is the real cause for concern.

  This article was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights organization.