The white political elite in America – politicians, judges, lawyers, policymakers, businesses and corporations – has never as a whole acted in good faith towards its Black citizens. These “leaders” routinely moved electoral goalposts, added impediments to gum up the voting process, made promises they never intended to keep, lied, grudgingly made concessions and over time, always clawed them back.
Meanwhile, on the ground during the last century, mobs of white vigilantes used a campaign of terror, intimidating Black potential voters, beating, brutalizing and lynching African Americans, and burning down Black businesses and whole communities.
Americans love to push out their chests and gloat about the freedoms citizens enjoy, but a dirty little secret is that being “American” has never referred to ALL Americans.
Throughout much of history, African Americans and their native brothers and sisters were forced to stand outside the proverbial shop window looking in, barred from entering by menacing gatekeepers and often forcibly removed, beaten, and killed if they tried to get inside.
The ability to vote is the sacred touchstone of American democracy but to this point, it is merely aspirational, frail, ethereal, because those opposed to electoral freedom have never quite figured out how to contend with America’s Original Sin.
For centuries, those in power found, and continue to manufacture, techniques to wage a relentless, multi-pronged war against a people.
The latest antagonists, in a long list of adversaries, are Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature and the MAGA-Republican-led US Supreme Court.
The future of the Voting Rights Act
Earlier in October, justices listened to arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a significant redistricting case that could determine the very future of the Voting Rights Act.
If the high court overturns Section 2 – a provision that bans racial discrimination in voting — GOP-controlled legislatures would rush to redraw at least 19 more voting districts for the House of Representatives in favor of Republicans in the 2026 midterms, according to a recent report by the voting rights advocacy groups Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action.
The result, a National Public Radio story notes, could have “a cascading effect on congressional maps in mostly Southern states where Republicans either control both legislative chambers and the governor’s office or have a veto-proof majority in the legislature — and where voting is racially polarized, with Black voters tending to vote Democratic and white voters tending to vote Republican.”
New maps would deny racial minority voters a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidate, with Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas possibly ending up with fewer Democratic representatives in Congress.
Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee could lose all of theirs, the report finds. And as much as 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus and 11% of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus could also be lost.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that Republicans would cement one-party control of the House for at least a generation, according to Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund.
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“Part of the point that we’re trying to make with this report is that what happens in the South doesn’t just stay in the South,” Albright adds. “This racial gerrymandering has the ability to not just disempower, disenfranchise Black voters and to eliminate Black elected officials and Latino elected officials. What happens in these states impacts the entire country.”
In Florida DeSantis and his MAGA Republican accomplices have eagerly embraced President Donald Trump’s commands for Republican state leaders to hold special sessions to redraw electoral districts in favor of the GOP.
DeSantis has argued in favor of manipulating electoral mechanisms to ensure that Florida is one of those states.
“I think the state is malapportioned,” he said at a press conference in Bradenton. “So I do think it would be appropriate to do a redistricting in the mid-decade. So we’re working through what that would look like, but I can tell you just look at how the population has shifted in different parts of the state over a four-to-five-year period. It’s been really significant.”
Using population data from the US Census, legislators or independent commissions draw district lines once a decade to account for population changes. But Trump has upended the practice in an effort to pad the slim GOP majority in the House of Representatives.
The governor is proud of his actions in 2022 when he vetoed an original congressional redistricting map passed by the Legislature, labeling it a “disaster.” DeSantis then championed a proposal the Legislature agreed to pass that erased Black representation in Northern Florida and helped to flip Congress.
While a variety of voting rights groups sued to strike down that map, the Florida Supreme Court ruledthat it was constitutional. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz said that legislators had a “superior” obligation to follow federal equal protection law, and not the Fair Districts Amendment passed by Florida voters in 2010.
That amendment had a clause modeled after the Voting Rights Act now being scrutinized by the U.S. Supreme Court that said legislators could not diminish the ability of minorities to elect a representative of their choice. The Florida Supreme Court decision gives legislators in the future a way to sidestep that clause.
The Fair District Amendment also bans congressional districts from being “drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”
But will DeSantis and the Legislature be able to use court rulings related to race to draw districts that accomplish the goal of flipping Democratic seats while at the same time eliminating minority representation in Congress? Time will tell.
The League of Women Voters of Florida detailed the deliberate and expansive efforts by DeSantis and his cronies to use legislation, policies, programs and subterfuge to steadily reduce the electoral playing field for African Americans.
“In recent years, the state of Florida has implemented an alarming series of policies that undermine voter participation, creating conditions ripe for mass voter intimidation, LWV officials said in the report. “State officials, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, have weaponized law enforcement to target voters across the state, from the arrest of formerly incarcerated individuals who believed they were eligible to vote to the harassment of citizens who signed petitions for a reproductive right ballot initiative.”
The report described these instances of systematic voter intimidation as a “a dangerous and deliberate attempt to disenfranchise certain communities – led explicitly by state institutions. They undermine both the rule of law and democratic norms. These actions create a chilling effect on political participation, discouraging people within the targeted communities from engaging in civic life. Fear and confusion around voter eligibility causes many to remain de facto disenfranchised even when they are legally eligible to vote.”
For years before the 2024 presidential election, DeSantis and legislative Republicans kept busy carrying out their part of their national party’s agenda to incapacitate parts of the state’s electoral apparatus to dissuade Black and brown voters, young people, seniors, and other Democratic constituencies from voting.
This meant passing a slew of laws that make it considerably harder to vote than was true four years earlier, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Florida is now one of four states that have “used single bills to enact an array of restrictions, imposing limits across the entire voting process,” the center has reported.
The Sunshine State is among 11 Republican-dominated legislatures that have impinged on ways the electorate can register to vote, while also restricting voter registration drives.
According to the Brennan Center report, DeSantis has given “partisan actors unprecedented authority over elections”; he has also created “election police” to investigate and prosecute supposed fraud and intimidate eligible voters.
We are living in a time when those responsible for upholding the law are doing everything but. DeSantis, Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Supreme Court and phalanx of MAGA Republicans are making their moves with significant, concerted pushback from Democrats.
There is little expectation that the forces of regression, bigotry and retreat – who have plotted and schemed on ways to eviscerate not just the Voting Rights Act, but also to ensure that Black and brown voting power is permanently hobbled, disabled, demolished, will be slowed down.
And with this, we can expect these rogues to steal not just the 2026 midterm elections but the 2028 presidential elections as well.