Cover Image: Bring Back the Poll Tax!-The GOP War on Voting Rights

Bring Back the Poll Tax!-The GOP War on Voting Rights

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Member Reviews

With the ever-expanding attacks on voting rights that have come out of red state legislatures following the 2020 election, Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s book is a timely and compelling read.

Hutchinson, who has a PhD in sociology as well as a B.S. in psychology and an M.A. in humanities, began his career by publishing a newsletter while hosting a radio show on social and political issues. He went on to write for several well-known newspapers and magazines including the Huffington Post before publishing several books on the issues surrounding race in America.

In his latest book, he explores the history of voting rights and oppression in the U.S. and shows how the past is still informing the present with legislative plays on election laws from the GOP.

While congressional Republicans have propagated the narrative of election security based on an immediate risk of election fraud, Hutchinson makes it clear that this is only a cover for their real ploy, which is to control who is allowed to vote to sway elections in their favor.

Time and time again, voter fraud commissions appointed by GOP Secretaries of State and Department of Justice officials have found virtually no evidence of widespread election fraud.

Hutchinson points out that these investigations have culminated in “14 vote fraud cases in 22 states out of 84 million votes cast,” or a 0.00000017% fraud rate. In regards to federal election fraud cases, the Department of Justice found that just 0.00000013% of the ballots cast in the 2002 and 2004 elections were fraudulent.

Bring Back the Poll Tax offers a plethora of information on voting rights and the legislation that both affirms and violates this essential part of our democracy. Earl Ofari Hutchinson did a great job of providing factual evidence that backs up his view that the GOP is less concerned with maintaining our constitutional rights than it is with its own power.

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First I would rate this book 3.75 stars out of 5. It should be pretty obvious which way this book leans by reading the title but get past and read some informative information from the past and up thru today. It is amazing the disturbing steps politicians have gone thru to suppress votes and voting and unfortunately some still seems to be occurring. Hard to believe that in modern times only 27% of white Americans say that there are eligible voters that are being denied the chance to vote. There are politicians who try to claim they are only protecting the integrity of the system. But you know what they say If it quacks like duck and walks like a duck it is a duck and the author points out various ways that politicians are either accomplishing or at least trying to using poll taxes, literacy laws, gerrymandering, vote mail and many others. You keep hearing that there is a lot of voter fraud happening and yet there is no proof. Much of the attack is on the 1965 Voting rights act. According to the author this goes all up to and including the supreme court with at least justice who has been stanchly against this act. Another argument is that felons should not be given the right to vote. According to the author many convicted felons are convicted of what maybe considered minor felonies. If they truly wanted to take their rights away why do the courts not taking their voting rights away at sentencing ? What about once you pay your debt to society should you not get that right back ? There is a discussion of the electoral college that a former president mention was a disaster for democracy until he won the presidency because of the said system. There is also the argument that there is realistically only a handful of states that decide the presidential election. Take a chance educate your self a little more and then decide. Thank you to Netgalley and BooksGoSocial for an ARC for a fair and honest review.

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The daily news always has something on voting abuses, it seems. Eight months after the last election, they’re still arguing about recounting ballots – again. So people get inured to it; it’s just part of life in the USA. But Earl Olfari Hutchinson is highly sensitized to it. His latest book, Bring Back The Poll Tax! – The GOP War On Voting Rights is a concrete reminder of why America is having these arguments in the first place. It is a brief history of abuse, entirely by Republicans, and almost entirely in the southern states.

Although I absolutely knew everything Hutchinson mentions in the book (he breaks no new ground whatsoever), it is very powerful to see it all in one place. And, no surprise, I had forgotten a number of the facts he dredges up. For example, that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts made his name as a 26 year-old advisor to President Reagan. His constant advice: don’t renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There is no need for it. There is no longer any inequality or discrimination, and the southern states don’t deserve to be watched over for voting rights abuses. No surprise then that 30 years later, the Roberts court took a pickaxe to the law, calling the oversight rules unconstitutional (because they only applied to the southern states). This has freed the states to implement all kinds of barriers to voting, and we read about new ones almost daily.

Lest we forget, these states implemented literacy tests, poll taxes, rare polling places and inconvenient voting hours to help reduce the possibility of minorities voting at all. (And if all else failed, there was always physical violence at the polls, either in the absence of law enforcement, or by it). Conveniently, whites did not have to pass the literacy test, which required copying by hand a segment of the state constitution and then interpreting it, in addition to the proofs of birth, citizenship, residence and so on. And pay the fee, of course. No, people (whites) who had any ancestor at all who could vote before 1867 (when no Blacks could) were exempt and could directly register, even if they couldn’t sign their own names. The result in Oklahoma for example, was just 57 Blacks out 55,000 were registered to vote in 1900, Hutchinson says. Mission accomplished.

Today, a popular discouragement is the photo ID card, which everyone has, but which states ensure is not the right kind. No university ID cards, government employee ID cards and sometimes not even state drivers licenses qualify to register or to vote. The very thought of mail-in ballots, where no ID is necessary, makes these states cringe. It means far too many minorities can get their ballots counted. Automatic registration at the age of 18 is a horror clearly beyond the pale.

Another barrier is intent. In order for voters to succeed in their suits against the state, as provided for in the Voting Rights Act, the courts decided they have to prove intent to discriminate. The states, to no one’s surprise, carefully avoid the mention of race, color or creed anywhere, and therefore intent never shows up on paper. So even though the effect is plainly discriminatory, the states rely on the fiction that there was no such intent.

Hutchinson is a book machine. This is at least his fifth book in two years. They tend to be short, shallow and highly focused on a single issue. But they also show the rush to publish. This book, for example, has a lot of problems with English. It reads as if it were dictated and the software wrote it out for him. The result is wandering, overly complicated sentences, typical of speech. Extra words, wrong words, words out of order, capitalized words that shouldn’t be and ungrammatical sentences appear throughout.

It means the reader hits bumps. These errors make the reader stop to try to figure out what Hutchinson actually meant, and what exactly makes the sentence wrong. It does not help the flow.

One example:

Three years after, Chief Justice SCOTUS Roberts was
now in the legal driver’s seat and could see to that. Given
his avowed long history of antipathy to the Act, he left the
heavy lifting to SCOTUS ultra-conservative Antonin Scalia
during the court’s oral arguments in Shelby County v.
Holder (2013). He didn’t disappoint, “I don’t think there is
anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation
of this act,” Scalia continued.

Chief Justice SCOTUS Roberts is just wrong. All you have to say is Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts. And Scalia continued is bizarre, since this is the first mention of him. It makes me wonder what I missed. Worse, the quote makes no sense. Only the president can renew the Act, and what Scalia says in the quote is hardly a condemnation of anything.

Worse still, Hutchinson calls the literacy test the literary test half the time, which doesn’t help his cause. He uses the term “damp down” (the growing Black population wanting to vote). But I believe he means “tamp” down. Tamp down is to pound and compress something into a flat state. Damp down means to sprinkle water on it. I could be wrong, but damp down seems weak and wrong. He says it four times.

The book is also very onesided – all anti-Republican. This despite there being no shortage of Dixiecrats and gerrymanderers in the Democratic dugout to help themselves at the expense of Black and minority voters.

It is also annoyingly repetitive. For such a short book to say the same things repeatedly goes hand in hand with clumsy writing. It needs editing. So while it is important to know the facts and understand why we are where we are today, this book could do a better job of it.

David Wineberg

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