It’s safe to say that in living memory, public trust in American elections has never been lower. A year into Joe Biden’s presidency, the statistics have become familiar: Roughly two-thirds of Republicans, and more than 40 percent of the general electorate, do not believe Biden’s 2020 victory was legitimate.
While Republican leaders pushing claims about the 2020 election being fraudulently decided ought to—and likely do—know better, the incentives are not hard to grasp. Pushing back against Donald Trump’s insistence that he won the election is politically dangerous within the GOP. But there’s a longer-standing tradition, as well: Hysteria about election fraud has served the GOP’s legislative aims reliably. Last year, under the banner of “election integrity,” at least 19 states imposed new restrictions on voting access, and additional restrictions are in the works. These run a wide gamut, from familiar methods (such as tightening voter ID requirements) to novel ones (like making it a crime to pass out bottled water at polling places).
If this moment represents a rare and novel crisis, it also reflects an old pattern. The use of election fraud claims to justify voter suppression has a deep history in the United States, and nowhere was it used more aggressively than in the post-Confederate South. During Reconstruction and the so-called “Redeemer” era, reports that Black voters intended to commit fraud served as grist for massive campaigns of voter suppression and intimidation. Ultimately, at the dawn of the Jim Crow era, this all culminated in a series of new state constitutions that systematically stripped Black men—and in many cases, poor whites as well—of their voting rights.
In speeches last month, Biden compared the January 6 insurrectionists to Confederate soldiers and likened the newest voting restrictions to Jim Crow policies. These comparisons were essentially apt—even if the laws in question are not nearly as extreme as those of the Jim Crow South. But the decades immediately following the Civil War, which are often overlooked in national memory, and which produced the Jim Crow order, may be the most instructive period for the present moment.
Southern fears about phantasmic voter fraud became widespread in the late 1860s, as ballot access was being extended to Black men on a state-by-state basis—and, not coincidentally, as the Ku Klux Klan was also expanding its reach. These voting rights were solidified in 1870, with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which said no man could be turned away from the polls because of his “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It’s hard to imagine the psychological effect this must have had on white Southerners. Hundreds of thousands of freedmen were now eligible to participate in elections, with each of their ballots carrying the same weight as the vote of a white aristocrat. The region’s electoral composition was swiftly and radically transformed.