Joseph Sabino Mistick: Voting and justice

In 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson said, “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”

Congress passed Johnson’s Voting Rights Act then, outlawing any measures that would deny black Americans their right to vote. It has resulted in massive increases in minority voter registration in the South, where there are still politicians who fight it.

Right now, it is hard to turn away from the death of George Floyd. But even as mourners gathered to bury him and as thousands of Americans continued to march for justice, another election in Georgia was conducted under a cloud of racial injustice.

It was the same old story. Ballot shortages and machine malfunctions and closed polling places discouraged voters in those counties where black voters hold the majority. Long ago, people of goodwill stopped believing any of this could be happenstance.

Even though they lost the Civil War, white officials in the South quickly found ways to stop black Americans from voting. Poor black voters had to pay an unaffordable tax or pass an impossible literacy test before they could vote. Whites had no tax or test.

These days, reducing the number of polling places or placing them far away from minority communities are ways to keep black and poor Americans from voting. Sometimes polling places are simply relocated to places where the buses do not run.

Onerous voter ID laws that require documents the poor and elderly cannot readily obtain and purges of voter rolls by ZIP code or ethnic surname are explained as election security measures. But the real goal is to suppress minority voters.

These are just some of the more sophisticated voter suppression tools. They have not replaced old-fashioned intimidation and trickery, which are still used effectively to keep minority voters away from the polls.

If winning is more important than winning fair and square, these tactics make sense. Voter suppression is your only play when you are outnumbered and on the wrong side of the issues. But if you are interested in justice, this all must stop.

Johnson’s Voting Rights Act was renewed several times with bipartisan support, but critical provisions that hold the old Confederate states accountable have been stalled for years. And Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will not let them come up for a vote. Without those provisions, voter suppression will continue its run in the South.

States could follow Pennsylvania’s lead. Last year, a Republican- controlled Legislature worked with its Democratic counterparts and the Democratic governor to pass an election reform bill that authorized voting by mail, greatly increasing access to the polls for all citizens. That’s good government.

All we can hope for is that some good will come from great tragedy, and the death of Floyd has many Americans thinking about social justice more than ever. And just this one thing — allowing black Americans to vote freely — will go a long way.

Johnson, a political brawler from hardscrabble central Texas, showed us the way, when he said, “A man without a vote is a man without protection.”