Lanisha Bratcher, a North Carolina mother to two daughters, worked hard to shed the decisions of her past after she was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in 2013, according to the British daily newspaper The Guardian. She had gotten into a fight about two hours east of Charlotte, where she was raised in Hoke County, but since then, she’s worked hard to set a better example for her girls and was even trying for a promotion at Burt’s Bees, where she worked in the factory, The Guardian reported.
“I was at a better place in my life. I had a different mindset,” Bratcher told the newspaper. That was until “the walls came tumbling down” the day after Bratcher returned home from the hospital after suffering a miscarriage in July, she told The Guardian. Police greeted her at her home on July 23 and accused her of illegally voting in the 2016 presidential election, according to a news release the local news station WRAL obtained from the Hoke County Sheriff’s Office. To say the charge caught Bratcher by surprise would be an understatement. She told The Guardian she had no idea her felony conviction, which she was still on probation for, made her ineligible to vote.
People convicted of felonies lose the right to vote at least temporarily in every state except Maine and Vermont, and North Carolina is one of 21 states that doesn’t automatically reinstate a former felon’s right to vote until probation ends, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The result has been tens of thousands of North Carolina residents, disproportionately people of color, disenfranchised and hundreds of others charged with voting illegally because they didn’t know their rights had been stripped, according to a voting rights complaint levied on November 20 against the state. "The impact of this disenfranchisement scheme is staggering," attorneys said in the complaint on behalf of civil rights nonprofits including the NAACP.
They cited a recent estimate showing about 70,000 North Carolinians can not vote because of a felony conviction, even though they have been released from jail or in some cases, were never even incarcerated, to begin with. "And by wide margins, this scheme overwhelmingly harms African Americans, who represent 20% of North Carolina's voting population but 40% of those disenfranchised while on probation, parole, or a suspended sentence," attorneys said in the complaint. They attributed the mass disenfranchisement to state legislation passed by white supremacists who made their intent quite plain in the state’s Democratic handbook of 1898.
At the time, political power in black communities was intensifying, which white supremacists saw as a threat to their very existence and fought it vehemently. In one example of their attempt to regain that political power, a cartoonist depicted a vampire with the face of a black man terrorizing white people with “negro rule” on his wings, attorneys in the complaint cited from a News and Observer cartoon dated Sept. 27, 1898. Even legislators couldn’t hide their racist intentions and didn’t even try.
They wrote in the Democratic handbook: “Shortly after the colored man was enfranchised he showed himself the willing tool of the heelers and manipulators of the Republican Party. They had not those qualities of easy identification which the white man possesses. They were of a roving disposition, moved from place to place, and could readily conceal their identity. For the same reason it was easy to import them from other communities and to register ex-convicts and boys under twenty-one years of age.” Black people apparently weren’t even given the respect of being considered intellectually competent enough to come up with such a plan themselves. State officials wrote in the executive document that they “were taken advantage of by the unscrupulous Republican white bosses…” ”It became necessary, in order to protect the white voters of the State against having their honest votes off-set by illegally and fraudulently registered negro votes, to provide rigid safeguards against this class of frauds,” legislators added in the document.
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More than 120 years after the Democratic handbook, black North Carolina residents are still feeling the effects of the legislation, attorneys said in the complaint. Bratcher, who had moved nearly two hours away, had to quit her job to attend court in Hoke County, according to The Guardian. She was left embarrassed, struggling to find new work and facing 19 months in prison, the newspaper reported. Officials with the Hoke County Sheriff’s Office or local district attorney’s office didn’t drop warning cards signed by the KKK into black communities to scare citizens away from the polls, which The Washington Post reported was the case in Oklahoma in August 1922. But the unspoken message behind Bratcher’s arrest is as clear as the one reportedly airdropped from the hate group itself: “Do not attempt to vote unless you are legally registered and can vote for clean law enforcement."
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Unluckily for modern-day white supremacists and their ancestors, the disenfranchised don’t always scare easily. “If you don’t vote again, then the law would have done exactly what it was supposed to do, which is to suppress your vote,” Bratcher’s husband, Torris Jones, told The Guardian. “If they’ve got you afraid, then the law did what it’s supposed to do.”