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The vagaries of voting
Voting is a powerful thing, the results of which exercise us endlessly, as in the cases of Brexit and the election of President Trump. Twenty-six percent of Britain’s population voted to leave the European Union in 2016. That same year, little more than a quarter of the voting-eligible population in the United States chose Donald Trump as President.[1]
Enacting laws that prevent or discourage citizens from voting creates justified seething resentment and civil unrest. Polarising communities, and using peoples’ voting rights as a bargaining chip is bordering on the unforgivable. The only disappointing aspect of winning Catholic Emancipation in Ireland for example, was the disenfranchising of the forty-shilling freeholders, a sacrifice that Daniel O’Connell was willing to pay. This was unfortunate because many Roman Catholics were forty-shilling freeholders who had obtained the vote under the Catholic Relief Act of 1793. Curtailing voting rights may keep regimes in power, but it will never end well, and the legacy of distrust and marginalisation can live on for generations. Just look at some of the authorities who ‘fixed’ things in such a way to prevent swathes of adults voting in elections. Unionist led councils in parts of Northern Ireland engaged in gerrymandering to prevent Nationalist Catholics from voting, the apartheid regime in South Africa and white supremacists in the southern states of America prevented black people from voting, laws enacted in Nazi Germany in 1935-36 prevented Jews from voting. While antediluvian vestiges of these regimes still exist today, their laws are anachronistic and an affront to all right-thinking people. There is a worrying resurgence though of far-right ideology, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-LGBT, and white supremacism, so we must remember our history and not rest on our laurels.
But voting is not just about putting people into parliament. We also vote in referenda, in Ireland most recently in relation to marriage equality and repealing the eighth amendment of the Irish constitution. But it must be maddening for those whose lives will be directly affected by the outcomes of referenda when they see that their futures are at the mercy of voters who may not fully grasp the complexity of the issue being voted on, or who have been influenced by lobby groups. A.C. Grayling in Democracy and Its Crisis says that ‘Representative democracy should have no truck with referenda’ because ‘A referendum is an opinion poll, in which the profile of sentiment in the population, as it stands on the day of the vote, is measured.’ Grayling argues that the questions put forward in referenda are far too complex to be answered by a yes or a no. Indeed, he sees them as a vehicle for elected representatives to abdicate their duty by delegating the decision-making to the machinery of the referendum. But let’s rewind the clock a bit.
British constitutional history may not be the most riveting of subjects, but one of its landmark events, the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, was probably the biggest kick in the shins of the aristocracy since the English Civil War in the 1640s. Reform was badly needed in a country where large industrial cities had no parliamentary representation while barely populated rural boroughs did. Something had to give.
Remember Dunny on the Wold comprising one half acre; population - three mangy cows, a dachshund called Colin, and a small hen in his late forties? The trenchantly witty first episode of Blackadder the Third lampoons the downright corruption and misplaced sense of entitlement in what were laughingly called elections in Britain before the 1832 Reform Act. The way MPs landed a seat in parliament was very unparliamentary indeed, and one of the worst abominations was the rotten borough. Dunny on the Wold’s election slogan rings, ‘A rotten candidate for a rotten borough.’ Universal male suffrage was still a long way off and women of course, regardless of social class or education, did not have the vote, it being deemed by men who knew best that the female intellect could not cope with following a political argument and casting a ballot. A potwalloper, for example, was a parliamentary borough in which the male head of any household was entitled to vote if his property had a hearth large enough to boil a cauldron or ‘wallop a pot’. While George Eliot did not have the vote, at least she could write about the turbulent political landscape in Felix Holt, the Radical written in 1866, but set in the immediate aftermath of the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill, as Felix embarks on a path to oppose a political system in which, even after reform, candidates still do not represent the interests of the working class.
It’s all very well though, extracting humour from rotten boroughs, potwallopers and the like, but the roll call of injustices surrounding the business of electioneering and voting set the scene, so often throughout history, for political unrest, divided communities and violent flashpoints. The legacies of denying votes to Catholics in Northern Ireland, black people in South Africa and the southern states of America, and Jews in Nazi Germany, remain with us today. The fallout from these detrimental practices has played no small part in shaping our modern world.
But let’s return to the 1832 Reform Bill; while not exactly revolutionary, it did make a start at wresting power from wealthy landowners and tentatively begin to grant voting rights to a broader spectrum of albeit ‘pale, male and stale’ citizens. No wonder those large landowners resisted change. They had their own 'pocket' boroughs in which the lord of the manor chose his own MP, and with no secret ballot, voters could be bribed or intimidated – democracy it was not. That practice would continue until the Ballot Act of 1872 which introduced the process of secret voting that we are familiar with today. This reduced considerably the use of bribery and intimidation against tenants and employees by landlords and employers at election time. The ‘lower orders’ could now vote according to their will without being evicted or losing their jobs. From an Irish perspective this is significant in that the Ballot Act is seen as having played no small part in Charles Stewart Parnell’s election to The House of Commons in 1875. Roy Strong[2] describes the pre-1832 parliamentary system as ‘a gigantic anomaly, no longer reflecting the realities of a rapidly changing society.’ The large industrial city of Manchester with a population of 250,000 was not represented in parliament while the long-abandoned medieval borough of Old Sarum with just seven voters returned two MPs, and Dunwich, which had pretty much fallen into the sea hundreds of years previously, also returned two MPs.
The 1832 Reform Bill brought the conservative, property-owning middle classes into the voting fold, and for the first time ever, elected representatives had to listen to the people who voted them in. Since it was all about property, the working classes who had started the rallying cry for parliamentary reform, gained nothing. Britain was divided between the propertied classes who had political rights and the rest, who Roy Strong reminds us, ‘possessed neither’. Property ownership would also be central to voting rights in Northern Ireland.
But of course, denying people the civil right to vote, on spurious grounds, whether that be race, colour, religion or gender, was not just a practice in nineteenth century Britain. These mistakes would also be perpetrated in British colonies, and bearing in mind that most of the map of the world was pink until the mid-twentieth century, this is significant in the independent countries that emerged from colonialism, proof that injustices committed over hundreds of years still impact the geopolitical spheres of so many of these former colonies. The most obvious example is South Africa, where the abomination of white supremacy and Afrikaner power prevailed until those few days of April 26th to 29th, 1994 when the first all-race elections were held and more than 17 million black South Africans over the age of 18 voted for the first time, electing black South Africans to a new national assembly and Nelson Mandela as President. At many polling stations, queues stretched over a mile with voters waiting up to twelve hours to cast their ballots. A similar determination by black people to exercise their constitutional right to vote would be demonstrated in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.
It is interesting to note that even though racial segregation had existed in South Africa since colonial times under both the Dutch and British, it was not until 1948 that apartheid became official. Increasing tensions between white and non-white communities gave rise to the National Party, who wanted to implement harsher rules to maintain white dominance. Surprisingly, only 37 percent of white South Africans voted for the National Party in 1948. And yet the National Party, despite receiving fewer votes than the United Party, won most of the seats because of the distorting effect of the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system, a system which is still used in Britain today and something that Grayling disagrees with. He says, ‘a vote for a losing candidate is the same as no vote at all, because it secures no representation for the voter. He or she has to be content to be represented by someone on the other side of the argument from them. The system disenfranchises all losing voters.’
Over the next ten general elections in South Africa, FPTP allowed the pro-apartheid National Party win a majority every single time despite never getting more than 65 percent of the vote, and this anomaly enabled their dominance in parliament, giving them permission to entrench apartheid segregation and consolidate power.[3] FPTP thwarted the will of the majority black population, leaving political power to a small minority of white swing voters in marginal constituencies. A similar pattern would play out in Northern Ireland, in this case with minorities of Unionist swing voters in marginal constituencies. In that fateful 1994 election in South Africa FPTP was replaced with Proportional Representation. Nelson Mandela's African National Congress won 63 percent of the votes and consequently 63 percent of the seats. It is sobering to think that if South Africa had a proportional representation voting system in 1948, the National Party would not have won the election and instigated apartheid.
Owen Winter, co-founder of Make Votes Matter has little time for FPTP. In How a Broken Voting System Gave South Africa Apartheid in 1948[4] he concludes, ‘South Africa's broken voting system (the same one we still use in the UK) gave them a government that did not have majority support and ultimately gave them a racist system of oppression that lasted for over 40 years.’ An interesting twist though would happen on the island of Ireland where proportional representation was introduced after independence and continues to be used in the twenty-six county Republic of Ireland, while FPTP is used in the six counties of Northern Ireland. FPTP would play into the hands of the Unionists and work against the Catholic nationalists in the decades leading up to the ‘Troubles’.
Following the Anglo Irish Treaty of December 1921 which ended the War of Independence and set up the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland was given the choice of opting out, which it did without delay. In the fledgling six-county-state, nationalist politicians and their almost exclusively Catholic supporters, were regarded as enemies of the state by most rank and file unionists. This perceived threat gave Unionists the justification – in their eyes – to ‘re-arrange’ certain local government constituencies to prevent them from falling into nationalist hands. This state sanctioned gerrymandering polarised divisions.
Thomas Hennessy in Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles reminds us that gerrymandering was not a Province-wide practice; but was mainly concentrated in the western half of Northern Ireland. He explains how it worked in Derry where the electoral wards were gerrymandered with a majority of Catholics in one large ward alongside two smaller wards composed of Protestants. Even though there were 19,870 Catholic adults over the age of twenty-one, compared to 10,673 Protestants ‘a Unionist majority was produced on Londonderry Corporation because of the ethnic composition of the three electoral wards.’ As a result of gerrymandering, Hennessy says, ‘Unionists in the west of the Province often dominated in areas where they were a minority.’ Unionist control of local government meant Unionist control of public employment and public housing.
This state of affairs prevented the nationalists from organising themselves into a workable or meaningful party system, but nationalists were always going to win in nationalist areas anyway. The unionist government had another problem on its hands; it needed to prevent splinter unionist groups succeeding and the best way of achieving this was to abolish proportional representation. While this was successful in preventing unionist splinter groups from winning seats, it had no effect on nationalist representation. Northern Ireland was also entitled to thirteen seats at Westminster – all but two held by Unionists who supported the Conservative party. Unionist / nationalist representation remained pretty much unchanged until the beginning of what we call the ‘Troubles’.
In 1967, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was set up. Its members were drawn from both communities, although mainly from Nationalist Catholics who were more at a disadvantage under the Stormont government. Among NICRA demands was a fair system ('one man one vote') rather than one vote per household and an end to gerrymandering electoral boundaries, which in Nationalist areas led to the return of Unionist-led authorities.
But what did the quaintly called ‘one man one vote’ rail against? In Northern Ireland there existed a plural voting system, which had been abolished in the rest of the United Kingdom in 1948 but was kept for local council elections in Northern Ireland (proof, by the way, that local politics is important). This plural voting system gave business owners and university degree holders an extra vote, but these were abolished in the Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1968, a victory for the civil rights movement.
Seosamh Gráinséir[5] explains the situation excellently in his article One Man, One Vote in Irish Legal Heritage. Until the late 1960s, only ratepayers and their spouses had a vote in local council elections. This meant that the less well-off living in rented accommodation did not have the right to vote. The landlords who they rented from though, had multiple properties and hence multiple votes. While tenants in council houses did pay rates and so had the right to vote, the allocation of council houses by unionist led councils was overtly crooked. This was highlighted by the Cameron Commission in 1969 which reported that councils ‘withheld planning permission, or caused needless delays, where they believed a housing project would be to their electoral disadvantage.’
As the first civil rights marches got underway in August 1968, Stormont (Northern Ireland government) began banning them, saying they were illegal because the police had not been notified of the intention to march. The marchers ignored the ban and, on several marches, they were attacked and beaten by the police with batons. When footage of the attacks was seen on televisions around the world Stormont was widely condemned for its actions. Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill agreed to some of the demands, but another group of people refused to accept the concessions, saying they were too little especially as Stormont had still not introduced 'one man one vote'. This was the People’s Democracy Movement set up by Northern Ireland students, led by Bernadette Devlin. On January 1st 1969 the People’s Democracy, marched for jobs, houses and ‘one man, one vote’. They were attacked by Protestants, including uniformed RUC. No attackers were arrested, but eighty marchers were. Comparisons of police behaviour could be made with Selma, Alabama a few years earlier.
The People’s Democracy Movement then organised a march from Belfast to Derry to take place on January 4th 1969. Near Derry, at Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were ambushed by loyalists including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary.[6] They were stoned and beaten, while on-duty police made little effort to stop the attacks. O'Neill was appalled by the scenes and announced an inquiry, despite opposition from his own party. O'Neill's Deputy Prime Minister resigned in protest saying the inquiry could only make matters worse. In February 1969 a general election was called in Northern Ireland. Although O'Neill's party won most votes, they no longer had enough to form a strong government. A civil rights march was brutally broken up by the RUC on October 5th.
O'Neill then decided to introduce 'one man one vote' for the next election, but this caused so much chaos and anger from his own party that he was forced to resign and he was replaced by James Chichester-Clark. Meanwhile civil rights marches began to get violent, fuelled by the anger at the violence that had met their earlier marches. As marchers clashed with police and loyalists, riots sprang up. In the summer of 1969 Chichester Clark called in the B-specials to help the police keep order. However, this only increased Catholic resentment and the situation began to get out of control. The ‘Troubles’ had begun.
Across the Atlantic, in the southern states of America, civil rights activists were also marching for their rights and one of these was voting rights, the very rights that empower you. Every obstacle was put in the way of black people to prevent them from performing their civic duty of voting. For example, when you went to the courthouse to register as a voter, the information you gave, like your address and place of employment, would more than likely be used at some time to find you and intimidate you.[7] Another humiliating charade was the literacy test where you could be asked to interpret a section of the state constitution.
All of these injustices were brought into stark relief when, in 1962, Fanny Lou Hamer, a very brave forty-four-year old sharecropper in Sunflower County, Mississippi volunteered to go to the courthouse in Indianola to register as a voter, the most dangerous activity a civil rights activist could do. Fewer than five percent of black adults were registered to vote in Mississippi. She was fired from her job, evicted from her home and told that she failed the literacy test; and because she helped other activists recruit applicants for voter registration, her husband and daughter also lost their jobs. The Hamers received a $9,000 water bill from Sunflower County even though their house had no running water, and Fanny Lou Hamer was arrested and beaten in jail. Undeterred and incredibly courageous, she returned to the courthouse every thirty days to take the literacy test until she passed it in January 1963. That same year, in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Martin Luther King said, ‘We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.’ This concern was never more important than today when so many people are disinclined to vote for parties and candidates that are failing to respond to their needs. These are the voters whose support the alt right movement is actively seeking.
In the ‘Freedom Summer’ of 1964 hundreds of white volunteers mainly from colleges outside the South helped register black voters. Alongside the predictable brutality from white racists, the most sinister event of this summer was the murder of three of the volunteers by the Ku Klux Klan. This violence was played out with exceptional cruelty in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King came to organise voting rights demonstrations. On a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, the police had a free rein to brutally attack them with impunity. The brutality in Mississippi and Alabama caught the attention of the nation at large and resulted in the enacting of the Voting Rights Act by Congress in 1965.
Notwithstanding so-called voting rights, thirty-five[8] states in America today require voters to have ID, purportedly to reduce voter fraud[9]. This ID requirement is supported by Republicans who are perhaps not so enthusiastic about expanding access to voting to the ‘wrong types’ and opposed by Democrats who believe that the ID requirement mitigates against black voters, who mostly vote Democrat. The dilemma is that many black voters are unlikely to have the types of ID required, and polling stations do not accept the types of ID that black voters are more likely to have. So black voters are being specifically targeted and prevented from voting, but lawmakers get away with it because they are not ‘preventing’ [10]black people from voting, rather they have put rules in place specifically designed to stop black people from voting.[11] The abstract of a paper, Understanding the Adoption of Voter Identification Laws in the American States, by Daniel Biggers and Michael Hanmer makes interesting reading. ‘We consistently find that the propensity to adopt is greatest when control of the governor’s office and legislature switches to Republicans (relationships not previously identified), and that this likelihood increases further as the size of Black and Latino populations in the state expands.’
Gerrymandering is also very widespread in America and, again, it is specifically designed to prevent black people from having as much power as white people in elections. Recently, the United States Supreme Court decided, five against four, that the question of partisan gerrymandering was a political one that must be resolved by the elected branches of government, and not a legal question that the federal courts should decide.[12] The practice works no differently to how it did in Northern Ireland up to the late 1960s. In the United States, methods used to ‘mess’ with electoral boundaries are known as packing and cracking.
A packed district is drawn to include as many of the opposing party’s voters as possible – usually black Democratic voters in a Republican state. That helps the governing party win surrounding districts – occupied by for example, white Republican voters - where the opposition’s strength has been diluted to create the packed district.[13]
Cracking, on the other hand, splits up clusters of opposition voters – again, usually black Democratic voters in a Republican state - among several districts, so that they will be outnumbered in each – predominantly white Republican - district. The Republican party ends up winning elections because they win the districts rather than the popular votes. The system is specifically designed to make black votes worth less than white votes.[14] Of course, the Democrat's system was not squeaky clean either. Its well-oiled political machine that was Tammany Hall in New York was notorious for cronyism and corruption. Its most infamous Boss Tweed said, ‘I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating’ and this is indeed how things worked out. His ‘nominees’ were appointed to all key positions and became known as the ‘Tweed ring’. After nearly bleeding the city coffers dry, he was tried and convicted on charges of forgery and larceny in 1873.[15] And then there were the Dixiecrats, those strange permutations of Southern Democrat who opposed civil rights and had a campaign slogan of ‘Segregation Forever!’ in 1944[16].
And so, voting rights would eventually be granted, but not before significant struggles, peaceful and violent. And yet, inequalities still exist in the United Kingdom where an increasing number of people have never exercised their right to vote, in Northern Ireland where sections from both communities believe that they have not benefited enough from the Good Friday Agreement, in South Africa where too many black people still live in poverty in townships and where violence increases in a polarised society, and in the United States where too many black people are still marginalised in many ways and are the targets of voting discrimination. Interestingly, Georgia, plus at least eight other states in America, has a ‘use it or lose it’ law that can cancel voter registrations of people who haven’t voted in recent elections. One wonders how the Brexit referendum would have played out if such a law existed in the United Kingdom, we know how it impacted on the 2016 US presidential election.
[1] German Lopez in https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/10/13587462/trump-election-2016-voter-turnout
[2] The Story of Britain from the Romans to the Present. 2018. Weidenfield & Nicolson.
[3] Thompson, L. A History of South Africa. 1990. Yale University Press.
[4]https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/owen-winter/south-africa-apartheid_b_11662272.html?
[5] Published 12 October 2018 on https://irishlegal.com/article/irish-legal-heritage-one-man-one-vote
[6] The Ulster Special Constabulary was a quasi-military reserve police force set up in October 1920, shortly before the partition of Ireland. The force was almost exclusively Ulster Protestant and as a result was viewed with great mistrust by Catholics. The force was disbanded in May 1970, after the Hunt Report, which advised re-shaping Northern Ireland's security forces to attract more Catholic recruits as well as disarming the police. Its functions and membership were largely taken over by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary Reserve.
[7] Yamasaki, M. Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 We Shall Overcome, Some Day. 2007. History Compass.
[8] See list on National Conference of State Legislatures. http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id.aspx#Details
[9] In 2014 an investigation published by the Washington Post found just 34 cases of voter fraud between 2004 and 2014 at a rate of just one fraudulent ballot per 29m ballots cast. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2019/02/19/do-voter-id-laws-reduce-turnout-among-black-americans
[10] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X16687266
[11] Read about similar injustices on https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-suppression-black-voters America’s Relentless Suppression of Black Voters by Lawrence Goldstone
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/what-is-gerrymandering.html
[13] ibid
[14] ibid
[15] https://www.biography.com/political-figure/boss-tweed
[16] https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1751.html
The vagaries of voting
Voting is a powerful thing, the results of which exercise us endlessly, as in the cases of Brexit and the election of President Trump. Twenty-six percent of Britain’s population voted to leave the European Union in 2016. That same year, little more than a quarter of the voting-eligible population in the United States chose Donald Trump as President.[1]
Enacting laws that prevent or discourage citizens from voting creates justified seething resentment and civil unrest. Polarising communities, and using peoples’ voting rights as a bargaining chip is bordering on the unforgivable. The only disappointing aspect of winning Catholic Emancipation in Ireland for example, was the disenfranchising of the forty-shilling freeholders, a sacrifice that Daniel O’Connell was willing to pay. This was unfortunate because many Roman Catholics were forty-shilling freeholders who had obtained the vote under the Catholic Relief Act of 1793. Curtailing voting rights may keep regimes in power, but it will never end well, and the legacy of distrust and marginalisation can live on for generations. Just look at some of the authorities who ‘fixed’ things in such a way to prevent swathes of adults voting in elections. Unionist led councils in parts of Northern Ireland engaged in gerrymandering to prevent Nationalist Catholics from voting, the apartheid regime in South Africa and white supremacists in the southern states of America prevented black people from voting, laws enacted in Nazi Germany in 1935-36 prevented Jews from voting. While antediluvian vestiges of these regimes still exist today, their laws are anachronistic and an affront to all right-thinking people. There is a worrying resurgence though of far-right ideology, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-LGBT, and white supremacism, so we must remember our history and not rest on our laurels.
But voting is not just about putting people into parliament. We also vote in referenda, in Ireland most recently in relation to marriage equality and repealing the eighth amendment of the Irish constitution. But it must be maddening for those whose lives will be directly affected by the outcomes of referenda when they see that their futures are at the mercy of voters who may not fully grasp the complexity of the issue being voted on, or who have been influenced by lobby groups. A.C. Grayling in Democracy and Its Crisis says that ‘Representative democracy should have no truck with referenda’ because ‘A referendum is an opinion poll, in which the profile of sentiment in the population, as it stands on the day of the vote, is measured.’ Grayling argues that the questions put forward in referenda are far too complex to be answered by a yes or a no. Indeed, he sees them as a vehicle for elected representatives to abdicate their duty by delegating the decision-making to the machinery of the referendum. But let’s rewind the clock a bit.
British constitutional history may not be the most riveting of subjects, but one of its landmark events, the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, was probably the biggest kick in the shins of the aristocracy since the English Civil War in the 1640s. Reform was badly needed in a country where large industrial cities had no parliamentary representation while barely populated rural boroughs did. Something had to give.
Remember Dunny on the Wold comprising one half acre; population - three mangy cows, a dachshund called Colin, and a small hen in his late forties? The trenchantly witty first episode of Blackadder the Third lampoons the downright corruption and misplaced sense of entitlement in what were laughingly called elections in Britain before the 1832 Reform Act. The way MPs landed a seat in parliament was very unparliamentary indeed, and one of the worst abominations was the rotten borough. Dunny on the Wold’s election slogan rings, ‘A rotten candidate for a rotten borough.’ Universal male suffrage was still a long way off and women of course, regardless of social class or education, did not have the vote, it being deemed by men who knew best that the female intellect could not cope with following a political argument and casting a ballot. A potwalloper, for example, was a parliamentary borough in which the male head of any household was entitled to vote if his property had a hearth large enough to boil a cauldron or ‘wallop a pot’. While George Eliot did not have the vote, at least she could write about the turbulent political landscape in Felix Holt, the Radical written in 1866, but set in the immediate aftermath of the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill, as Felix embarks on a path to oppose a political system in which, even after reform, candidates still do not represent the interests of the working class.
It’s all very well though, extracting humour from rotten boroughs, potwallopers and the like, but the roll call of injustices surrounding the business of electioneering and voting set the scene, so often throughout history, for political unrest, divided communities and violent flashpoints. The legacies of denying votes to Catholics in Northern Ireland, black people in South Africa and the southern states of America, and Jews in Nazi Germany, remain with us today. The fallout from these detrimental practices has played no small part in shaping our modern world.
But let’s return to the 1832 Reform Bill; while not exactly revolutionary, it did make a start at wresting power from wealthy landowners and tentatively begin to grant voting rights to a broader spectrum of albeit ‘pale, male and stale’ citizens. No wonder those large landowners resisted change. They had their own 'pocket' boroughs in which the lord of the manor chose his own MP, and with no secret ballot, voters could be bribed or intimidated – democracy it was not. That practice would continue until the Ballot Act of 1872 which introduced the process of secret voting that we are familiar with today. This reduced considerably the use of bribery and intimidation against tenants and employees by landlords and employers at election time. The ‘lower orders’ could now vote according to their will without being evicted or losing their jobs. From an Irish perspective this is significant in that the Ballot Act is seen as having played no small part in Charles Stewart Parnell’s election to The House of Commons in 1875. Roy Strong[2] describes the pre-1832 parliamentary system as ‘a gigantic anomaly, no longer reflecting the realities of a rapidly changing society.’ The large industrial city of Manchester with a population of 250,000 was not represented in parliament while the long-abandoned medieval borough of Old Sarum with just seven voters returned two MPs, and Dunwich, which had pretty much fallen into the sea hundreds of years previously, also returned two MPs.
The 1832 Reform Bill brought the conservative, property-owning middle classes into the voting fold, and for the first time ever, elected representatives had to listen to the people who voted them in. Since it was all about property, the working classes who had started the rallying cry for parliamentary reform, gained nothing. Britain was divided between the propertied classes who had political rights and the rest, who Roy Strong reminds us, ‘possessed neither’. Property ownership would also be central to voting rights in Northern Ireland.
But of course, denying people the civil right to vote, on spurious grounds, whether that be race, colour, religion or gender, was not just a practice in nineteenth century Britain. These mistakes would also be perpetrated in British colonies, and bearing in mind that most of the map of the world was pink until the mid-twentieth century, this is significant in the independent countries that emerged from colonialism, proof that injustices committed over hundreds of years still impact the geopolitical spheres of so many of these former colonies. The most obvious example is South Africa, where the abomination of white supremacy and Afrikaner power prevailed until those few days of April 26th to 29th, 1994 when the first all-race elections were held and more than 17 million black South Africans over the age of 18 voted for the first time, electing black South Africans to a new national assembly and Nelson Mandela as President. At many polling stations, queues stretched over a mile with voters waiting up to twelve hours to cast their ballots. A similar determination by black people to exercise their constitutional right to vote would be demonstrated in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.
It is interesting to note that even though racial segregation had existed in South Africa since colonial times under both the Dutch and British, it was not until 1948 that apartheid became official. Increasing tensions between white and non-white communities gave rise to the National Party, who wanted to implement harsher rules to maintain white dominance. Surprisingly, only 37 percent of white South Africans voted for the National Party in 1948. And yet the National Party, despite receiving fewer votes than the United Party, won most of the seats because of the distorting effect of the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system, a system which is still used in Britain today and something that Grayling disagrees with. He says, ‘a vote for a losing candidate is the same as no vote at all, because it secures no representation for the voter. He or she has to be content to be represented by someone on the other side of the argument from them. The system disenfranchises all losing voters.’
Over the next ten general elections in South Africa, FPTP allowed the pro-apartheid National Party win a majority every single time despite never getting more than 65 percent of the vote, and this anomaly enabled their dominance in parliament, giving them permission to entrench apartheid segregation and consolidate power.[3] FPTP thwarted the will of the majority black population, leaving political power to a small minority of white swing voters in marginal constituencies. A similar pattern would play out in Northern Ireland, in this case with minorities of Unionist swing voters in marginal constituencies. In that fateful 1994 election in South Africa FPTP was replaced with Proportional Representation. Nelson Mandela's African National Congress won 63 percent of the votes and consequently 63 percent of the seats. It is sobering to think that if South Africa had a proportional representation voting system in 1948, the National Party would not have won the election and instigated apartheid.
Owen Winter, co-founder of Make Votes Matter has little time for FPTP. In How a Broken Voting System Gave South Africa Apartheid in 1948[4] he concludes, ‘South Africa's broken voting system (the same one we still use in the UK) gave them a government that did not have majority support and ultimately gave them a racist system of oppression that lasted for over 40 years.’ An interesting twist though would happen on the island of Ireland where proportional representation was introduced after independence and continues to be used in the twenty-six county Republic of Ireland, while FPTP is used in the six counties of Northern Ireland. FPTP would play into the hands of the Unionists and work against the Catholic nationalists in the decades leading up to the ‘Troubles’.
Following the Anglo Irish Treaty of December 1921 which ended the War of Independence and set up the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland was given the choice of opting out, which it did without delay. In the fledgling six-county-state, nationalist politicians and their almost exclusively Catholic supporters, were regarded as enemies of the state by most rank and file unionists. This perceived threat gave Unionists the justification – in their eyes – to ‘re-arrange’ certain local government constituencies to prevent them from falling into nationalist hands. This state sanctioned gerrymandering polarised divisions.
Thomas Hennessy in Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles reminds us that gerrymandering was not a Province-wide practice; but was mainly concentrated in the western half of Northern Ireland. He explains how it worked in Derry where the electoral wards were gerrymandered with a majority of Catholics in one large ward alongside two smaller wards composed of Protestants. Even though there were 19,870 Catholic adults over the age of twenty-one, compared to 10,673 Protestants ‘a Unionist majority was produced on Londonderry Corporation because of the ethnic composition of the three electoral wards.’ As a result of gerrymandering, Hennessy says, ‘Unionists in the west of the Province often dominated in areas where they were a minority.’ Unionist control of local government meant Unionist control of public employment and public housing.
This state of affairs prevented the nationalists from organising themselves into a workable or meaningful party system, but nationalists were always going to win in nationalist areas anyway. The unionist government had another problem on its hands; it needed to prevent splinter unionist groups succeeding and the best way of achieving this was to abolish proportional representation. While this was successful in preventing unionist splinter groups from winning seats, it had no effect on nationalist representation. Northern Ireland was also entitled to thirteen seats at Westminster – all but two held by Unionists who supported the Conservative party. Unionist / nationalist representation remained pretty much unchanged until the beginning of what we call the ‘Troubles’.
In 1967, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was set up. Its members were drawn from both communities, although mainly from Nationalist Catholics who were more at a disadvantage under the Stormont government. Among NICRA demands was a fair system ('one man one vote') rather than one vote per household and an end to gerrymandering electoral boundaries, which in Nationalist areas led to the return of Unionist-led authorities.
But what did the quaintly called ‘one man one vote’ rail against? In Northern Ireland there existed a plural voting system, which had been abolished in the rest of the United Kingdom in 1948 but was kept for local council elections in Northern Ireland (proof, by the way, that local politics is important). This plural voting system gave business owners and university degree holders an extra vote, but these were abolished in the Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1968, a victory for the civil rights movement.
Seosamh Gráinséir[5] explains the situation excellently in his article One Man, One Vote in Irish Legal Heritage. Until the late 1960s, only ratepayers and their spouses had a vote in local council elections. This meant that the less well-off living in rented accommodation did not have the right to vote. The landlords who they rented from though, had multiple properties and hence multiple votes. While tenants in council houses did pay rates and so had the right to vote, the allocation of council houses by unionist led councils was overtly crooked. This was highlighted by the Cameron Commission in 1969 which reported that councils ‘withheld planning permission, or caused needless delays, where they believed a housing project would be to their electoral disadvantage.’
As the first civil rights marches got underway in August 1968, Stormont (Northern Ireland government) began banning them, saying they were illegal because the police had not been notified of the intention to march. The marchers ignored the ban and, on several marches, they were attacked and beaten by the police with batons. When footage of the attacks was seen on televisions around the world Stormont was widely condemned for its actions. Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill agreed to some of the demands, but another group of people refused to accept the concessions, saying they were too little especially as Stormont had still not introduced 'one man one vote'. This was the People’s Democracy Movement set up by Northern Ireland students, led by Bernadette Devlin. On January 1st 1969 the People’s Democracy, marched for jobs, houses and ‘one man, one vote’. They were attacked by Protestants, including uniformed RUC. No attackers were arrested, but eighty marchers were. Comparisons of police behaviour could be made with Selma, Alabama a few years earlier.
The People’s Democracy Movement then organised a march from Belfast to Derry to take place on January 4th 1969. Near Derry, at Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were ambushed by loyalists including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary.[6] They were stoned and beaten, while on-duty police made little effort to stop the attacks. O'Neill was appalled by the scenes and announced an inquiry, despite opposition from his own party. O'Neill's Deputy Prime Minister resigned in protest saying the inquiry could only make matters worse. In February 1969 a general election was called in Northern Ireland. Although O'Neill's party won most votes, they no longer had enough to form a strong government. A civil rights march was brutally broken up by the RUC on October 5th.
O'Neill then decided to introduce 'one man one vote' for the next election, but this caused so much chaos and anger from his own party that he was forced to resign and he was replaced by James Chichester-Clark. Meanwhile civil rights marches began to get violent, fuelled by the anger at the violence that had met their earlier marches. As marchers clashed with police and loyalists, riots sprang up. In the summer of 1969 Chichester Clark called in the B-specials to help the police keep order. However, this only increased Catholic resentment and the situation began to get out of control. The ‘Troubles’ had begun.
Across the Atlantic, in the southern states of America, civil rights activists were also marching for their rights and one of these was voting rights, the very rights that empower you. Every obstacle was put in the way of black people to prevent them from performing their civic duty of voting. For example, when you went to the courthouse to register as a voter, the information you gave, like your address and place of employment, would more than likely be used at some time to find you and intimidate you.[7] Another humiliating charade was the literacy test where you could be asked to interpret a section of the state constitution.
All of these injustices were brought into stark relief when, in 1962, Fanny Lou Hamer, a very brave forty-four-year old sharecropper in Sunflower County, Mississippi volunteered to go to the courthouse in Indianola to register as a voter, the most dangerous activity a civil rights activist could do. Fewer than five percent of black adults were registered to vote in Mississippi. She was fired from her job, evicted from her home and told that she failed the literacy test; and because she helped other activists recruit applicants for voter registration, her husband and daughter also lost their jobs. The Hamers received a $9,000 water bill from Sunflower County even though their house had no running water, and Fanny Lou Hamer was arrested and beaten in jail. Undeterred and incredibly courageous, she returned to the courthouse every thirty days to take the literacy test until she passed it in January 1963. That same year, in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Martin Luther King said, ‘We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.’ This concern was never more important than today when so many people are disinclined to vote for parties and candidates that are failing to respond to their needs. These are the voters whose support the alt right movement is actively seeking.
In the ‘Freedom Summer’ of 1964 hundreds of white volunteers mainly from colleges outside the South helped register black voters. Alongside the predictable brutality from white racists, the most sinister event of this summer was the murder of three of the volunteers by the Ku Klux Klan. This violence was played out with exceptional cruelty in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King came to organise voting rights demonstrations. On a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, the police had a free rein to brutally attack them with impunity. The brutality in Mississippi and Alabama caught the attention of the nation at large and resulted in the enacting of the Voting Rights Act by Congress in 1965.
Notwithstanding so-called voting rights, thirty-five[8] states in America today require voters to have ID, purportedly to reduce voter fraud[9]. This ID requirement is supported by Republicans who are perhaps not so enthusiastic about expanding access to voting to the ‘wrong types’ and opposed by Democrats who believe that the ID requirement mitigates against black voters, who mostly vote Democrat. The dilemma is that many black voters are unlikely to have the types of ID required, and polling stations do not accept the types of ID that black voters are more likely to have. So black voters are being specifically targeted and prevented from voting, but lawmakers get away with it because they are not ‘preventing’ [10]black people from voting, rather they have put rules in place specifically designed to stop black people from voting.[11] The abstract of a paper, Understanding the Adoption of Voter Identification Laws in the American States, by Daniel Biggers and Michael Hanmer makes interesting reading. ‘We consistently find that the propensity to adopt is greatest when control of the governor’s office and legislature switches to Republicans (relationships not previously identified), and that this likelihood increases further as the size of Black and Latino populations in the state expands.’
Gerrymandering is also very widespread in America and, again, it is specifically designed to prevent black people from having as much power as white people in elections. Recently, the United States Supreme Court decided, five against four, that the question of partisan gerrymandering was a political one that must be resolved by the elected branches of government, and not a legal question that the federal courts should decide.[12] The practice works no differently to how it did in Northern Ireland up to the late 1960s. In the United States, methods used to ‘mess’ with electoral boundaries are known as packing and cracking.
A packed district is drawn to include as many of the opposing party’s voters as possible – usually black Democratic voters in a Republican state. That helps the governing party win surrounding districts – occupied by for example, white Republican voters - where the opposition’s strength has been diluted to create the packed district.[13]
Cracking, on the other hand, splits up clusters of opposition voters – again, usually black Democratic voters in a Republican state - among several districts, so that they will be outnumbered in each – predominantly white Republican - district. The Republican party ends up winning elections because they win the districts rather than the popular votes. The system is specifically designed to make black votes worth less than white votes.[14] Of course, the Democrat's system was not squeaky clean either. Its well-oiled political machine that was Tammany Hall in New York was notorious for cronyism and corruption. Its most infamous Boss Tweed said, ‘I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating’ and this is indeed how things worked out. His ‘nominees’ were appointed to all key positions and became known as the ‘Tweed ring’. After nearly bleeding the city coffers dry, he was tried and convicted on charges of forgery and larceny in 1873.[15] And then there were the Dixiecrats, those strange permutations of Southern Democrat who opposed civil rights and had a campaign slogan of ‘Segregation Forever!’ in 1944[16].
And so, voting rights would eventually be granted, but not before significant struggles, peaceful and violent. And yet, inequalities still exist in the United Kingdom where an increasing number of people have never exercised their right to vote, in Northern Ireland where sections from both communities believe that they have not benefited enough from the Good Friday Agreement, in South Africa where too many black people still live in poverty in townships and where violence increases in a polarised society, and in the United States where too many black people are still marginalised in many ways and are the targets of voting discrimination. Interestingly, Georgia, plus at least eight other states in America, has a ‘use it or lose it’ law that can cancel voter registrations of people who haven’t voted in recent elections. One wonders how the Brexit referendum would have played out if such a law existed in the United Kingdom, we know how it impacted on the 2016 US presidential election.
[1] German Lopez in https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/10/13587462/trump-election-2016-voter-turnout
[2] The Story of Britain from the Romans to the Present. 2018. Weidenfield & Nicolson.
[3] Thompson, L. A History of South Africa. 1990. Yale University Press.
[4]https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/owen-winter/south-africa-apartheid_b_11662272.html?
[5] Published 12 October 2018 on https://irishlegal.com/article/irish-legal-heritage-one-man-one-vote
[6] The Ulster Special Constabulary was a quasi-military reserve police force set up in October 1920, shortly before the partition of Ireland. The force was almost exclusively Ulster Protestant and as a result was viewed with great mistrust by Catholics. The force was disbanded in May 1970, after the Hunt Report, which advised re-shaping Northern Ireland's security forces to attract more Catholic recruits as well as disarming the police. Its functions and membership were largely taken over by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary Reserve.
[7] Yamasaki, M. Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 We Shall Overcome, Some Day. 2007. History Compass.
[8] See list on National Conference of State Legislatures. http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id.aspx#Details
[9] In 2014 an investigation published by the Washington Post found just 34 cases of voter fraud between 2004 and 2014 at a rate of just one fraudulent ballot per 29m ballots cast. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2019/02/19/do-voter-id-laws-reduce-turnout-among-black-americans
[10] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X16687266
[11] Read about similar injustices on https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-suppression-black-voters America’s Relentless Suppression of Black Voters by Lawrence Goldstone
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/what-is-gerrymandering.html
[13] ibid
[14] ibid
[15] https://www.biography.com/political-figure/boss-tweed
[16] https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1751.html
