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According to Trump, the votes were illegitimate based on where they were cast. “Detroit and Philadelphia are known as two of the most corrupt political places in our country, easily,” he said. “They cannot be responsible for designing the outcome of a presidential race.”
This was a new twist in the racial logic of the American right, which has shifted from preventing blacks from voting to allowing them to vote as long as not all of their votes are counted.
It is important to remember that the United States was a slave state for more than 200 years and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. Throughout that time, in certain parts of the country, all black votes were, by definition, illegal, and conservatives worked hard to keep it that way. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that brief reign is now at stake.
In 2013, just one year after black voter turnout rates surpassed those of white voters for the first time, the supreme court struck down the Voting Rights Act, which provided some legal protections for black voters in places where they had previously been excluded.
Georgia, the home state of the late Representative John Lewis, soon went to work to thwart the black vote with weapons more subtle than the tear gas and clubs used in Selma, Alabama in 1965. The state reduced the number of polling stations. by nearly 10%, purged tens of thousands of voters from the lists simply because they hadn’t voted in a while, and suspended the registrations of another 50,000 people, mostly black, for discrepancies as small as omitting a dash in their name. Those long lines that we witness around elections weren’t just voter enthusiasm, they were voter suppression as well.
The problem is that as white people become a minority in the United States, efforts to disenfranchise non-white voters necessarily become increasingly stark and desperate, but cannot be guaranteed to produce results. The sums just don’t add up for Republicans.
