Quotessence
Home / Topics / Voter Suppression Quotes

Voter Suppression Quotes

Browse 35 quotes about Voter Suppression.

Voter Suppression Quotes

“The ACLU and NAACP went right after the core of the issue—there was no voter fraud. Therefore, there was no state interest at stake—certainly nothing that could warrant this assault on the Fifteenth Amendment. It "bear[s] repeating," they asserted, that Indiana had "not identified even a single instance of voter impersonation fraud occurring at the polls in the history of Indiana" and no one in the state has "ever been charged" with that crime. Ever. Moreover, when the bill was being drafted, "no evidence of in-person impersonation fraud was presented to the legislature," making SEA 483, at best, a solution in search of a problem.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageIndianaVoter SuppressionVoter FraudDisenfranchisement
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“Despite the fact that this scene played out over and over in registrars' offices across the South—where a registrar in Mississippi could even ask African Americans, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" —the law itself was just race-neutral enough to withstand judicial scrutiny.”

RacismWhite SupremacyInstitutional RacismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“What the states could not accomplish by law, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.”

RacismWhite SupremacyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“Whites had already posted a sign on the black church in Taylor County, Georgia: "The first Negro to vote will never vote again." Snipes was not deterred. In July 1946, he cast his ballot in Taylor County's primary. In fact, he was the only black person to do so; and with that act of democratic bravery, Maceo Snipes signed his death warrant. A few days later four white men showed up at Snipes's house and demanded that he step outside. As he stood on the porch, they pointed their guns at him and began firing. Snipes staggered and fell to the ground. They just walked away. His mother ran out of the house and got him to the hospital, but in Jim Crow America, black patients did not have the right to health care. He lay in a room the size of a closet unattended for six hours bleeding, just bleeding. This strong man, this veteran, lingered for two more days, but the damage was too extensive, the medical treatment too slow, and Georgia's hate too deep.”

RacismWhite SupremacyUs HistoryVoter SuppressionRacial Violence
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“America was paralyzed; on one hand, by the power of the Southern Democrats in Congress, whose inordinate political strength and control of key committees was based on their ability to win reelection after reelection because of massive disfranchisement and racial terror; and on the other, by the missionary-like belief that America was the champion of democracy and freedom in the battle against the Soviet Union, whose death grip on human rights had no limits.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCold WarSoviet UnionUs HistoryVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote. The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice's section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens. But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter SuppressionVoting Rights Act
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: "I don't want everybody to vote.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to "protect the integrity of the ballot box," require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being "civic-minded.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageAgeismVoter SuppressionVoter Fraud
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party's ideas but on massive disfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the "talisman" of humanity that voting represents. The lie of voter fraud breaks a World War II veteran down into a simple, horrifying statement: "I wasn't a citizen no more." It forces a man, a retired engineer who was instrumental in building this nation, into facing a bitter truth: "I am not wanted in this state." It eviscerates the key sense of self-worthy in a disabled man who has to pen the painful words "My constitutional rights have been stripped from me." It maligns thousands of African Americans who resiliently weathered the Missouri cold and hours of bureaucratic runarounds as nothing but criminals and frauds. It leaves a woman suffering from lung cancer absolutely "distraught" and convinced that "they prevented us from voting," because none of her IDs could penetrate Wisconsin's law. It shatters the dying wish of a woman who, in her last moments on earth, wanted to cast a vote for possibly the first woman president of the United States. But an expired driver's license meant none of that was to be.”

PoliticsRacismAmerican HistoryUs HistoryClassismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“Iowa congressman Steve King lamented the passing of "a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote." Florida congressional candidate Ted Yoho echoed that sentiment when he also proffered, "You used to have to be a property owner to vote." Of course, after the Great Recession, with African American homeownership lower than it had been during the 1930s and the lowest of all ethnic and racial groups in the United States, the implications of the GOP longings were obvious.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistoryClassismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“In 1890...the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“Bilbo was pointing to the power of the literacy test and understanding clause, which were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate...for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans.”

EducationRacismAmerican HistoryLiteracyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“When it comes to our democracy, and who we determine to have the right to vote--our most sacred of rights--patience is no virtue. We must never be patient when someone else's rights are in the balance. We cannot wait on laws, or elected officials, or anyone else. The only virtue when it comes to the right to vote is impatience.”

DemocracyVotingProtestAfrican AmericansBlacksImpatienceVoting RightsVoter Suppression
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
Create image

“.. if requiring you to show your ID is a method of oppression, then there is an awful lot of oppression going on in this country. Airports are full of oppression. Liquor stores? Oppression. Want to buy a pack of cigarettes? Hope you like your oppression extra smooth. Want to buy a car? Careful, oppression loses half it's value the minute you drive it off the lot.”

OppressionVoter SuppressionVoters And VotingVoter Id
Book:No Safe Spaces
Create image

“Many thought of the election of Barack Obama, not as the end of racism, but certainly as a turning point. And it was. But for many, President Obama's election was a turning point in a different direction. It spurred a backlash among white supremacists invested in maintaining the status quo. It can be no coincidence that the carnage of the Voting Rights Act so central to the Shelby decision occurred during the presidency of our first-ever Black president. It is no coincidence that in the decade since Obama's election, voter suppression has gained more momentum, velocity, and animosity than it had in the previous three elections combined. Since Shelby County v. Holder, voter suppression has taken on more pervasive and pernicious forms than ever before.”

VotingAfrican AmericansBlacksElectionsPresidentsBarack ObamaVoter Suppression
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
Create image

“Those who rage against and work against expanding the electorate know what's at stake. The goal is to block access to the ballot and to policy making because letting the agitators inside might yield new laws to remedy inequality or injustice. The fear of these elected officials is a loss of power, grounded in an assortment of causes like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, or an inchoate desire to keep the world as it was when they sat at the peak of influence. They forget that the bygone days of political tranquility never truly existed—the agitators simply hadn't amassed sufficient power to be heard. But they are getting closer to it every day.”

HistoryConservatismVoter Suppression
Book:Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America
Create image

“Another powerful tool to stop African Americans from having any political voice was the white primary. Key to the white primary effectiveness was the fact that from Reconstruction until 1968 the South was a one-party system⁠—only Democrats needed apply, so despised was the party of Lincoln. Several of the states, therefore, began to discern that one way to skirt around the Fifteenth Amendment was to tinker with the primary election, during which the Democratic candidate was chosen.”

RacismSuffrageVoter SuppressionWhite Primary
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“The goal of all the GOP voter ID laws is to reduce significantly the demographic and political impact of a growing share of the American electorate. To diminish the ability of black, Latinos, and Asians, as well as the poor and students to choose government representatives and the types of policies they support. Unfortunately, it's working.”

RacismAgeismClassismVoter SuppressionVoter Id Laws
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“We must stop asking incumbents who they are training to take their place. This question reinforces the belief that our votes do not count, which discourages people from voting. Public office seats belong to the public. Once an incumbent leaves, they can not give, appoint, or assign that seat to anyone because it is not theirs. Though they can train whomever they wish, ultimately, it is up to us, the people, to vote them in.”

WisdomPoliticsPoliticiansPolitical PhilosophySabrina NewbyVoter SuppressionWe The People
Author:Sabrina Newby
Create image

“Republicans win when people are demoralized and you have a small voter turnout, which by the way is why they love voter suppression. I believe that our campaign up to now has shown that we can create an enormous amount of enthusiasm from working people, from young people, who will get involved in the political process and which will drive us to a very large voter turnout.”

PeopleWayBelieveYoungPoliticalWinningI BelieveProcessAmountInvolvedRepublicanCampaignsEnormousEnthusiasmVotersGet InvolvedSuppressionDemoralizedVoter SuppressionVoter Turnout
Author:Bernie Sanders
Create image

“In community after community, there are unemployment rates among young African-Americans of 30 to 40 percent. Thirty to 40 percent! Kids have no jobs, they have no future. That is an issue that has got to be dealt with simultaneously as we deal with police brutality, voter suppression and the other attacks that are taking place on the African-American community.”

KidsJobsYoungCommunityDealsIssuesPercentPoliceRateAfrican AmericanThirtyVotersUnemploymentPolice BrutalityBrutalitySuppressionUnemployment RateVoter Suppression
Author:Bernie Sanders
Create image