"The Myth of Voter Suppression" by Fred Lucas

Like everything else in contemporary America, the subject of elections has divided along red and blue lines. By significantly changing rules on ballots, how they’re collected, how they’re secured, how voting does or doesn’t require a photo ID, and similar areas, the divide opens between conservatives concerned about election fraud and progressives cry “voter suppression.”  

Fred Lucas, manager of the Investigative Reporting Project at The Daily Signal (a conservative news outlet), took a close look at what evidence there is for both voter fraud and voter suppression. In The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections, he makes a convincing case that voter suppression is indeed a myth, while election fraud has a long and dishonorable history in American elections.

 

The two sides of election concern have a long and interwoven history, Lucas says. Voter suppression, in fact, was almost standard operating procedure in Southern states during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods – and it was a procedure perfected by state Democratic parties to keep as few Black Americans from voting as possible. And it played a significant role in how the Democratic Party kept a hammerlock on cities like New York and the Southern states in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. (I can personally testify to that control; I grew up in Louisiana, where for decades your only political choices were Democrats.)

 

Fred Lucas

Lucas looks at electoral reforms, undertaken by almost half of the states, to see if any of them have discouraged voting. They haven’t. The reforms include cleaning the voting rolls of dead people and people who’ve left the state (something the Michigan secretary of state recently fought to keep from happening, for some unknown reason). He discusses the business of vote trafficking (in a capitalist society, everything gets capitalized). And he also considers how race is used in the arguments over election reform.

 

He examines the various bills introduced and occasionally passed by one house of the current Congress that would essentially federalize control of elections (Lucas sees that as a dangerous mistake). And he presents an in-depth study of all of the various groups behind the claims of “voter suppression” and who’s funding them – including some of the biggest charitable foundations in America.

 

Lucas is also the author of Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Elections, The Right Frequency: The Story of the Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment, Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump, and other works. An award-winning journalist and veteran White House correspondent, he’s written and reported for Fox News, Newsweek, National Review, History Magazine Quarterly, The Washington Examiner, Newsmax, The Blaze, Townhall, The Federalist, The National Interest, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and other news outlets. He received a B.A. degree from Western Kentucky University and an M.S. degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. He lives in Virginia. 

 

The Myth of Voter Suppression is both a timely and vital book. Well-research and well-documented, it tells a story of great concern and great peril for the future of American elections. 

 

Related: 

 

Tainted by Suspicion by Fred Lucas.