Nina Turner Quotes
People don't wake up to go to vote and then have their ballot not counted.
Turner, Nina. Quoted in "Ohio's Election System Under Fire." The Plain Dealer, Advance Local, 12 Sep. 2014.
Although this is generally attributed to Stalin, there is no writing of his that has the quotation. So some believe that this quotation is apocryphal.
In the beginning of the 21st century, many republican state legislatures attempted to change the voting laws to eliminate the possibility of voter fraud which was not a serious practical problem in America. However, a consequence—some argue indented and some argue unintended—was that it was harder for certain groups of people to meet the new requirements and therefore was a de facto voter suppression for some people such as the very elderly, the homeless, and the poor. Many of these efforts were declared unconstitutional by the courts.
Ironically, for 100 years after the Civil War, it was the Democrats who tried to keep the Blacks from voting as until Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt began to attract Negro votes, Blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican. In 1964 President Johnson, with bipartisan support overcame the Southern Democratic Filibuster and passed the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act. The Republican leadership, sensing the Southern Democratic Anger at the Democratic Party Leadership, implemented their Southern Strategy and embraced the most racist Southern Democrats if they would switch parties. Most did quickly. Soon, almost all the conservatives had abandoned the Democratic Party. This made the Republican Party more conservative and soon liberal Republicans were extinct and by the end or the 20th century, most of the moderates were gone. With almost all of the worst racists in the nation becoming Republicans and being warmly welcomed by the Republican leadership, almost all Blacks became Democratic voters. Then the racist conservatives went back to their time-tested mechanisms for suppressing the Black vote—only this time it was for the benefit of the Republican party. Soon the non-racist Republicans, realizing that minority voter suppression could be an effective mechanism to offset the greater minority fertility rate, the increased voting rate of the young, and the alienation of many unmarried women to the more conservative Republican ideology, got behind voter fraud prevention—a more acceptable purpose for activities that coincidently could make it more difficult for minorities to register and vote. Those activities were what Judge Debevoise was referring to in this quotation.
A counter ethical argument says that voter suppression is ethically no different from gerrymandering, or having too few locations for voting, or voting on a Tuesday where poor people cannot often get to the polls with work and/or child obligations. For Republicans to suppress Black voting is only logical since such a high percentage of Blacks vote Democratic. It would be the same if Democratic legislatures could make it difficult for business executives to vote. It part of the rough and tumble reality of American politics.
Nina Hudson Turner is an American politician from Ohio. A member of the Democratic Party, she was a Cleveland City Councillor from 2006 to 2008 and an Ohio State Senator from 2008 until 2014.
