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 ( )