This is what voter suppression looks like
I’ve seen almost exactly the same photo over and over again this week: A long line snakes around city blocks as people wait (and wait and wait) to vote. Often, they are posting photos as inspiration: “This is what democracy looks like!” But waiting hours in line to cast a ballot isn’t a sign of a healthy democracy. In fact, in some cases, it’s a sign of voter suppression.
As Americans head to the polls, Reveal looks back at a massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. To kick Black politicians out of office, heavily armed White supremacist mobs staged a coup and murdered roughly 60 Black men. They also broke into voting precincts, started fires and stuffed ballot boxes. This bloody chapter in American history isn’t one that’s often taught in schools, but it’s the backdrop for the quieter, more bureaucratic forms of voter suppression that persist today.Over the past few years, many states and municipalities have gotten more aggressive in enacting stricter voter ID laws, shutting down polling places in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, or sometimes, as in North Carolina, discarding absentee ballots from Black voters at triple the rate as those from White voters.
But state and local governments aren’t acting alone. Reporter Will Carless dug into a conservative group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF, that claimed there was widespread voter fraud in Florida. The organization sent Palm Beach County election officials a list of voters it claimed had cast ballots in recent elections despite having died years before. The only hitch was … those voters were still alive. Reveal found no evidence that votes have been cast for dead people in the county and disproved at least 56 instances of alleged voter fraud compiled by the group. As Will reports, PILF is part of a network of well-funded conservative nonprofits working behind the scenes to push the specter of voter fraud and pressure local election officials into purging or “cleaning up” voter rolls. Those purges would remove actual voters from registration rolls.
But despite the long lines and other voter suppression efforts, people are turning out in record numbers to vote in this year’s election. It’s heartening to see voters connect as they turn in their ballots, keeping spirits high with everything from drumlines to free pizza. As the late Rep. John Lewis said: “Your vote matters. If it didn’t, why would some people keep trying to take it away?”
– Sarah Mirk, digital engagement producer
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Will Carless is an investigative journalist focused on hate extremism. At Reveal, he’s reported stories such as the 
