December 7, 2000
The Structure of White Power and the Color of Election 2000
By Bob Wing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
What if there was an election, and nobody won?
Thank you, Florida, for exposing as fraud the much-vaunted
sanctity of the vote in this country and placing electoral
reform back on the country's agenda. It turns out that a
real election has more votes disqualified, miscounted, or
lost than the margin of error of a well-designed poll.
More importantly, the botched election exposed that voting
discrimination in Florida was widespread and that racism is
institutionally structured into the two-party, Electoral
College system.
Reports out of Florida show that people of color cast
a disproportionate number of the disqualified votes. On
election day, black and Haitian voters were harassed by
police, their names removed from the rolls, and their
ballots left uncounted by outdated machines. Thirty-five
years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, racist
violations of election law are rampant and should be
pursued to justice in Florida and elsewhere.
But beyond these immediate issues, this election reveals
again just how central race is to U.S. politics and how
racism is actually structured into election law. The
election reaffirms that people of color are the most
consistent liberal/progressive voters in the country and
that their clout is increasing -- but that electoral racism
effectively nullifies almost half of their votes. The Civil
Rights movement destroyed the monopoly over power by
whites, but the tyranny of the white majority is still
institutionalized in the winner-take-all, two-party,
Electoral College system.
Unless we place fighting electoral racism at the top of the
racial justice agenda, we cannot challenge the political
stranglehold of conservative white voters or maximize the
growing power of people of color.
By the Numbers
The idea that race and racism are central to American
politics is not just a theory that harkens back to the
days of slavery. It's a current-day lived reality that is
particularly evident in this country's biggest and most
sacred political event: the quadrennial presidential
pageant.
In Election 2000, 90 percent of African Americans voted
for Gore, as did 63 percent of Latinos, and 55 percent of
Asians. (No exit poll data on the Native American vote is
available, but most have historically voted Democratic.)
Combined, people of color accounted for almost 30 percent
of Gore's total vote, although they were only 19 percent
of voters.
Latinos, the country's fastest growing voting bloc, went
heavily Democratic -- even in Texas -- despite extensive
efforts by the Republicans to sway them. Most Asians
followed suit. People of color are becoming a larger portion
both of the U.S. population and of the electorate, and voting
largely in concert with each other in presidential elections.
On the other hand, whites constituted almost 95 percent of
Bush's total vote.
Conventional electoral wisdom discounts race as a political
factor, focusing instead on class, the gender gap, union
membership, etc. But, the only demographic groups that had a
fairly unified vote -- defined as 60 percent or more for one
of the candidates -- were: blacks, Latinos, Jews (81 percent
for Gore), union members (62 percent for Gore), residents of
large cities (71 percent for Gore), and white males (60
percent for Bush). All but union members and big-city
residents are racial or ethnic groups.
And, the large numbers of people of color in unions (about
25 percent) and big cities largely account for the heavy
Democratic vote of those demographic groups. White union
members and city dwellers vote to the left of whites who
live more racially isolated lives, but they barely tilt
Democratic. Similarly, women voted 54-43 for Gore, but
white women actually favored Bush by one point. Women
of color create the gender gap.
The same can be said of the poor: although 57 percent
of voters with incomes under $15,000 voted for Gore, poor
whites -- who make up just under half of eligible voters
in this category -- broke slightly for Bush. The income
gap in presidential politics is thoroughly racialized.
As the sociologist William Form pointed out long ago, if
only a bare majority of white working class people voted
consistently Democratic, we could have some kind of social
democracy that would provide much more social justice than
the conservative regimes we are used to.
Despite the pronounced color of politics, Ralph Nader
(and his multi-hued progressive pundits) blithely dismiss
the fact that he received only one percent of the votes of
people of color and that the demographics of his supporters
mirrored those of the Republicans (except younger). In The
Nation, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier points out that
more votes were considered "spoiled" -- and therefore
disqualified -- than were cast for the so-called
"spoiler," Ralph Nader.
Electoral College: Pillar of Racism
The good news is that the influence of liberal and
progressive voters of color is increasingly being felt
in certain states. They have become decisive in the most
populous states, all of which went to Gore except Ohio,
Texas, and (maybe?) Florida. In California an optimist might
even envision a rebirth of Democratic liberalism a couple of
elections down the road, based largely on votes of people of
color.
The bad news is that the two-party, winner-take-all,
Electoral College system of this country ensures, even
requires, that voters of color be marginalized or totally
ignored.
As set forth in the Constitution, the Electoral College
negates the votes of almost half of all people of color.
For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern
states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90
percent Democratic. However, white Republicans outvoted
blacks in every Southern state (and every border state
except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern
Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While nationally,
whites voted 54-42 for Bush, Southern whites, as usual, gave
over 70 percent of their votes to the Republican. They thus
completely erased the massive Southern black (and Latino,
Asian, and Native American) vote for Gore in that region.
Since the South's Electoral College votes go entirely
to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state,
whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes,
the result was the same as if blacks and other people of
color in the region had not voted at all. Similarly negated
were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and
Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican
states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, Montana -- and
Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails. And the
impact of the mostly black voters of Washington, D.C. is
unfairly minimized by the unfair denied statehood and the
arbitrary allocation to it of only three electoral votes.
In his New York Times op-ed, Yale law professor Akhil Amar
reveals that the hitherto obscure Electoral College system
was consciously set up by the Founding Fathers to be the
mechanism by which slaveholders would dominate American
politics.
The Constitution provided that slaves be counted as
three-fifths of a person (but given no citizenship rights)
for purposes of determining how many members each state
would be granted in the House of Representatives. This
provision vastly increased the representation of the
slave states in Congress.
At the demand of James Madison and other Virginia slave-
holders, this pro-slavery allocation of Congresspersons also
became the basis for allocation of votes in the Electoral
College. It is a dirty little secret that the Electoral
College was rigged up for the express purpose of translating
the disproportionate Congressional power of the slaveholders
into undue influence over the election of the presidency.
Virginia ended up with more than a quarter of the electors
needed to elect a president, and Virginia slaveholders
proceeded to hold the presidency for 32 of the
Constitution's first 36 years.
Since slavery was abolished, the new justification for the
Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to retain
some impact on elections. And so it does, but to the benefit
of conservative white Republican states. As Lani Guinier
reports, in Wyoming, one Electoral College vote corresponds
to 71,000 voters while in large population states (where the
votes of people of color are more numerous) the ratio is one
electoral vote to over 200,000 voters. So much for one
person, one vote.
The Electoral College remains a racist mechanism that
renders powerless the presidential votes of almost half of
all people of color in the country. This year the Electoral
College will apparently enable the winner of the conservative
white states to prevail over the winner of the national popular
vote -- a tyranny of the minority.
Two Party Racism
The two-party system also structurally marginalizes voters
of color.
First of all, to win, both parties must take their most
loyal voters for granted and focus their message and money
to win over the so-called undecided voters who will actually
decide which party wins each election. The most loyal Democrats
are strong liberals and progressives, the largest bloc of whom
are people of color. The most loyal Republicans are conservative
whites, especially those in rural areas and small towns. The
undecideds are mostly white, affluent suburbanites; and both
parties try to position their politics, rhetoric, and policies
to woo them. The interests of people of color are ignored or
even attacked by both parties as they pander to the "center."
Another consequence is that a disproportionate number of
people of color see no reason to vote at all. The U.S. has
by far the lowest voter participation rate of any democracy
in the world. The two party system so demobilizes voters
that only about 65 percent of the eligible electorate is
registered, and only 49 to 50 percent usually vote (far
less in non-presidential elections).
Not surprisingly, the color and income of those who actually
vote is skewed to higher income, older, and more conservative
white people. In the 1996 presidential election, 57 percent
of eligible whites voted compared to 50 percent of blacks
and 44 percent of Latinos. Seventy-three percent of people
with family incomes over $75,000 voted compared to 36
percent of those with incomes below $15,000.
In addition, current electoral law disenfranchises millions
of mainly Latino and Asian immigrants because they are not
citizens. And, according to Reuters, some 4.2 million
Americans, including 1.8 million black men (13 percent of
all black men in America), are denied the right to vote
because of incarceration or past felony convictions.
Proportional Representation
To remedy these racist, undemocratic electoral structures,
Lani Guinier and many others propose an electoral system
based on proportional representation. Canada, Australia,
all of the European countries except Britain, and many Third
World countries have proportional electoral systems. In such
systems, all parties that win a certain minimum of the popular
vote (usually five percent) win representation in the Congress
(or Parliament) equal to their vote. To win the presidency,
a party must either win an outright majority or form a
governing coalition with other parties.
Thus, for example, the German Green Party, which gets about
seven percent of the vote, is part of the ruling coalition
in that country. If we had such a system, parties representing
people of color could be quite powerful. Instead, in our current
system, voting for a third-party candidate like Nader takes votes
from Gore and helps Bush. And someone like Jesse Jackson, who
won 30 percent of the Democratic popular vote in 1988, is not
a viable candidate and his supporters have virtually no clout
in national politics.
If we fail to place fighting electoral racism at the very
top of a racial justice agenda, we will continue to be
effectively disenfranchised and white people, especially
conservative white Republicans, will enjoy electoral
privileges that enable them to shape the policies and
institutions of this country at our expense. We must fight
for a system of proportional representation, for eliminating
the role of big money in elections, and for making voting
readily accessible to poor folk.
Until we win a proportional system -- or unless there is
some other major political shakeup -- the vast majority
of people of color will continue to participate in the
Democratic Party. Therefore we should demand that the
Democrats more strongly represent their interests. We must
fight the Democratic move to the right, led by people like
Al Gore, or the majority of voters of color will be left to
the tender mercies of the racist, pro-corporate rightwing of
the Democratic Party. However, our ability to do this --
or to support or shape third parties that truly represent
our interests and include our peoples -- depends upon our
ability to form mass, independent racial justice organizations
and to build alliances with other progressive forces both
inside and outside the electoral realm.
Building electoral alliances -- around issues, referenda,
and candidates, both inside and outside the Democratic Party
-- is key to the maturation of a racial justice movement that
functions on the scale necessary to impact national politics,
social policy, or ideological struggle in this country.
--
Bob Wing is executive editor of ColorLines and a longtime
fighter for racial and economic justice.
Copyright (c) 2000 Bob Wing. All Rights Reserved.
Bob Wing, Editor
ColorLines Magazine
3781 Broadway
Oakland, CA 94612
510-653-3415 (ph)
510-653-3427 (fax)
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.colorlines.com
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