F

acing worsening polls, 
Donald 
Trump 
has 

brought the issue of 

voter fraud to the forefront of 
American 
political 

debate. 
He 
claims 

that because of voter 
fraud, the election is 
being rigged against 
him. It’s important 
to note where these 
claims come from; 
Trump is advocating 
for voter ID laws, a 
legislative 
monster 

that the Republican 
Party 
has 
been 

building up for years.

While Trump tries to frame 

the issue as protecting our 
democracy, we need to be 
aware of the facts. Voter ID 
laws are intended to prevent 
voter impersonation on Election 
Day, but, as I will prove, voter 
impersonation (showing up to 
the polls and pretending to be 
someone else) is non-existent. 
Under false claims, the issue 
of voter ID laws has become 
political. 
What’s 
really 
at 

stake with voter ID laws is the 
right to vote, which is an issue 
that should not be politicized. 
These laws already exist in 
20 percent of states. Voter ID 
laws 
are 
ineffective, 
could 

disenfranchise more than 21 
million Americans and must go.

The problem of voter fraud 

isn’t the issue it’s made out to 
be. Donald Trump correctly 
states that 1.8 million deceased 
people 
are 
still 
registered 

to vote, but that in no way 
indicates that voter fraud is 
being 
undertaken 
on 
their 

behalf. The much publicized 
South Carolina voting fraud 
case of dead people voting 
was investigated by the State 
Law 
Enforcement 
Division, 

and in an election with more 
than 1.3 million votes, just 
five possible, unaccounted-for 
“zombie” votes were found. 
Trump claims that 14 percent 
of non-citizens are registered 
to vote, but according to the 
managers 
of 
the 
database 

who accumulated the data 
he’s basing that on, “the likely 
percent of non-citizen voters in 
recent US elections is 0.”

In Florida, there are more 

instances 
of 
shark 
attacks 

than there are of voter fraud 
cases with sufficient evidence 
to investigate, according to 
Politifact. 
A 
comprehensive 

report 
published 
in 
The 

Washington Post found just 
31 potential incidents of voter 
fraud out of one billion votes 

cast, dating back to 2008. The 
number of Americans killed by 
lightning from 2000 to 2010? 
It’s numbered at 441, which is 

11 times the amount 
of potential voter 
fraud cases.

A research group 

from 
Arizona 

State 
University 

investigated 
2,068 
election-

fraud cases dating 
back to 2000 and 
concluded 
that 

while 
fraud 
has 

occurred, the rate 
is infinitesimal, and 

in-person voter impersonation 
on 
Election 
Day, 
which 

prompted 37 state legislatures 
to enact or consider tough 
voter ID laws, is virtually non-
existent. 

Let’s 
break 
down 
what 

we’re 
talking 
about: 
Voter 

impersonation exists on such 
an “infinitesimal” level that 
there is “virtually no voter 
impersonation 
fraud.” 
That 

is what all the data indicates 
over the past decade. However, 
to 
stop 
this 
non-existent 

problem, we have potentially 
disenfranchised up to 21 million 
Americans, roughly 11 percent 
of our country, which is the 
number of Americans without 
a valid voter ID who would be 
prevented from voting.

So why, you ask, do we have 

these laws at all? You might 
not be shocked at the answer 
— it’s political. Ninety-three 
percent of Blacks voted for 
the Democratic Party in the 
2012 election. There is an 
unmistakable trend that these 
laws are intended to suppress, 
in 
particular, 
votes 
from 

minorities. If you’re doubtful, 
look at the trends. Twenty-five 
percent of African Americans 
do not have the necessary voter 
ID that some states require, 
while only 8 percent of white 
Americans do not. The U.S. 
Court of Appeals ruled that the 
North Carolina voter ID law 
was unconstitutional, saying 
that the provisions “target 
African Americans with almost 
surgical precision.” What led 
them to such a conclusion? 
North 
Carolina 
lawmakers 

actually requested data on how 
race affected voting behaviors. 
According to the lawmakers, 
“with race data in hand, the 
legislature amended the bill to 
exclude many of the alternative 
photo IDs used by African 
Americans. The bill retained 
only the kinds of IDs that white 

North Carolinians were more 
likely to possess.”

In 
that 
race 
data 
was 

also research that indicated 
African 
Americans 
were 

more likely to use same-day 
registration 
and 
the 
early 

voting period. With this data 
in 
hand, 
North 
Carolina’s 

legislature eliminated same-
day registration and cut the 
early 
voting 
period 
nearly 

in 
half. 
Most 
damagingly, 

the judges wrote that this 
“comes as close to a smoking 
gun as we are likely to see in 
modern times, the State’s very 
justification for a challenged 
statute hinges explicitly on 
race.” This is a court, not a 
partisan think tank. Courts 
around the country have slowly 
started to rule these voter ID 
laws unconstitutional in that 
they target minority voters.

To 
further 
prove 
the 

politicized nature of the issue, 
feel free to juxtapose the most 
conservative states with those 
with the strictest voter ID laws. 
There’s another clear trend: In 
general, the more Republican 
the state, the harsher the voter 
ID laws. The GOP platform 
actually argues for stricter 
voter ID laws, even though 
a federal appeals court has 
ruled them unconstitutional. 
Combined 
with 
felony 

disenfranchisement, 
which 

by itself disenfranchises 13 
percent of the Black population 
in 
the 
United 
States, 
an 

absolutely staggering number, 
voter ID laws are intended to 
build upon laws that already 
suppress 
minority 
voting. 

There is no doubt that voter 
suppression of minorities is a 
politically charged action.

Democrats and Republicans 

both go out of their way to 
politicize what should not be 
politicized. This is just another 
example, but it’s crucial to 
promoting 
real 
democracy. 

Nearly 11 percent of the country 
does not have proper voter ID 
— to disenfranchise all those 
people for political reasons is 
undemocratic. In the face of 
voter fraud rhetoric, we can’t 
lose sight of the big picture and 
get steamrolled. We need to be 
finding ways to increase voter 
turnout, not depress it. On the 
principles of our democracy, 
we must reduce voter ID laws, 
and our rhetoric around it 
must change.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Voter suppresion is the real threat

Let’s deconstruct celebrity

ISAIAH ZEAVIN-MOSS | COLUMN

W

alking 
into 
The 

Loving 
Touch 
in 

Ferndale on a cold, 

dreary Thursday night, I was 
surprised to see, standing right in 
front of me, the artist 
whom I had come to 
watch. Greta Kline, 
the lead singer of 
Frankie Cosmos — one 
of my favorite bands 
— was selling her 
group’s merchandise, 
standing 
behind 
a 

propped-up table. No 
security in sight, no 
intra-crowd shoving 
or 
cursing 
to 
get 

Kline’s attention. She 
stood there, engaging 
with her fans, and we responded 
with equal calmness.

I 
found 
this 
experience 

surprising 
for 
many 
reasons. 

Principally, I find that we as a 
culture endow celebrities and 
artists whom we admire with 
certain divine attributes. We 
shake their hands and then do not 
wash that hand, as if the artist’s 
talent might literally rub off onto 
us. We configure lives for them, 
somewhat based on their music, 
but mostly upon our projections 
and fascinations and imaginations.

And I do not mean to distinguish 

myself from this culture of 
fanaticism. Last month, after 
seeing Bernie Sanders speak at 
UMMA, I felt viscerally saddened 
when I could not shake his hand. 
He was quickly swept behind a 
curtain by a big, burly security 
guard, and he was gone — whisked 
away and thrown back into the 
confines of my mind, where I can 
project fantasies and ideas about 
Sanders the celebrity, ignoring 
Sanders the human.

But Kline’s warm welcoming 

of her fans seemed to blur this 
very distinction between the 
celebrity and her fans. Instead, if 
only for a moment, she became 

one of us. Dressed in an oversized 
striped shirt, blue jeans and a 
simple baseball cap, Ms. Kline 
interacted seamlessly with the 
dozens of people asking for 

photographs. Many of 
these fans stood and 
stared in disbelief at 
Kline’s 
unequivocal 

generosity 
and 

welcoming attitude.

Immediately upon 

entering the space, I 
came up to her and 
asked if she would be 
in a photograph with 
me. 
She 
accepted, 

and turned to me 
— admittedly, I was 
sweating 
(I 
sweat 

more than anyone I’ve ever met, 
outside of my brother (and this is 
something we bond over a lot and 
he’s coming this weekend so if you 
see me feel free to empathize or to 
check in with us about our surely 
sweaty armpits and backs and 
faces (and do you feel the effect 
that this anecdote about my sweat 
had on you? You now feel like you 
know an additional element of me, 
the writer, Isaiah (Hi, I’m Isaiah), 
because I shared it with you, I 
said, “Hey, I can actually share 
more than I normally do because 
I trust my reader not to call me 
out. I trust that I can be a little bit 
vulnerable and playful with my 
reader. That’s what I think was at 
the core of Kline’s open welcome 
to her fans)))). I struck a pose — 
and, without a hesitation, Ms. 
Kline stuck her tongue out and her 
hands up as if we were best friends 
— and, in that moment, I felt like 
we could have been! She was right 
there with me, in that moment, 
equally embracing our shared 
sense of silliness and playfulness.

Eventually, the show began. 

Having seen Kline in this casual, 
playful context made me feel so 
much closer to her music, which 
deals explicitly with the narrator’s 

self-consciousness and anxiety. 
There was no longer any alienation 
between myself and the words 
and sentiments in the songs. This 
could be about me, this could be 
about any of my friends whom 
I’m dancing with, about any of my 
friends from home.

I think there’s a lesson to be 

learned from this experience: 
By fantasizing and imagining 
lives for celebrities, we do not, in 
fact, get closer to them. Instead, 
the conclusions at which we 
arrive have their footing in other 
assumptions 
that 
we 
make. 

And I’m not saying this sort of 
fanaticism is inherently wrong. 
Not at all. As I said, I engage in 
it — it’s fun to narrativize and 
to make characters of real-life 
human beings.

But I think if our goal is 

transparency — if our goal is to 
actually understand artists or 
celebrities for who they are — then 
we ought to try to break down the 
social barriers between fans and 
their idols, between public figures 
and their followers. We ought 
to have be able to interact with 
them in less strictly constructed 
settings, where they will not shy 
away from engaging with those 
who have flocked to witness them. 
Because in this kind of a space — 
one in which people engage freely 
and set aside the cultural currency 
attached to their bodies, we get a 
little bit closer to one another.

It takes courage. It takes both 

parties trusting each other not to 
humiliate or taunt. This is how 
we should regard one another by 
default. Just like I believe you, 
the reader, to be decent enough 
to know that I sweat, horribly, 
humiliatingly, 
disgustingly 

without criticizing me. My body 
gets exorbitantly wet. It does! And 
that’s OK.

ISAIAH

ZEAVIN-MOSS

LAURA SCHINAGLE

Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

SHOHAM GEVA

Editor in Chief

CLAIRE BRYAN 

and REGAN DETWILER 

Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

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EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Isaiah Zeavin-Moss can be reached 

at izeavinm@umich.edu

DON’T KNOW WHAT A REGENT IS?

GOOGLE IT.

THEN TUNE IN TO OUR PODCAST.

For our fifth episode of The Michigan Daily’s Election 

Podcast, columnist Brett Graham talks diversity, tuition 

increases and campus climate with candidate for 

University Regent Carl Meyers (R-Dearborn).

ROLAND DAVIDSON | COLUMN

From Baltimore to “Atlanta”

CJ MAYER | COLUMN

ROLAND

DAVIDSON

CJ

MAYER

CJ Mayer can be reached at 

mayercj@umich.edu

W

hen 
we 
discuss 

whether something 
is 
racist, 
there’s 

a sort of monolithism at play. 
A leaf is green because we all 
perceive it as such. 
However, an object 
or 
institution’s 

racist 
character 

depends on people’s 
perception; 
something 
only 

becomes 
racist 

once people decide 
it is. Rather than 
asking 
whether 

something is racist, 
it’s more productive 
to discuss whether 
or not people find 
it racist.

If you had to guess how many 

Native Americans are bothered 
by the name of the Washington 
Redskins, what would you say? 
Fifty 
percent? 
Seventy-five 

percent? This issue has been at 
the forefront of conversations 
about social justice for years, 
so it’s only logical to conclude 
that this bothers a significant 
portion of the Native American 
community. A recent survey found 
that 9 percent of Native Americans 
polled find the name offensive. 
This isn’t an argument that the 
name is appropriate. If very few 
Native Americans actually take 
pride in the name, I don’t think 
there are many (if any) compelling 
reasons to keep it. But, this piece of 
data goes to show how fickle our 
perception of racism is.

In other policy domains, we can 

see similar ways in which we’ve 
essentialized the views of people of 
color. Consider this recent pair of 
surveys about racism in the United 
States. In one conducted by CNN, 
17 percent of Blacks polled viewed 
the Confederate flag as a symbol of 
Southern pride. In another by Pew, 
36 percent of Blacks surveyed had 
a “great deal” or “fair amount” of 
confidence that local police treat 
Blacks and whites equally. Neither 
of these numbers is particularly 
high, but they were both much 
higher than I’d been led to believe 
by leftist discourse.

Let’s be clear: Police brutality 

is a serious issue — no two ways 
about it. In that same Pew survey, 
just 0.6 percent of Blacks expected 
the police to use an appropriate 
amount of force in a given scenario. 
In regards to the Confederate flag, 
73 percent of Blacks in the sample 
said that it should be taken down 
from 
government 
buildings. 

Clearly, these are both pressing 
issues that deserve action, but 
it’s important not to create a one-
dimensional Black perspective to 
advance social justice causes.

This sort of measured 

stance 
is 
good 
for 

discourse, but bad for 
advocacy. 
Can 
you 

imagine 
the 
NAACP 

saying that they speak 
for 47.543259 (to use 
an 
arbitrary 
number) 

percent 
of 
Black 

people? It would be a 
catastrophe. They would 
lose credibility in the 
public 
sphere. 
These 

well-intentioned 
and 

often effective groups — 

whose efforts I agree with — seek 
to institutionalize a limited version 
of truth to suit their agenda.

A large part of an institution’s 

power lies in its ability to convince 
people that it best represents the 
truth. To better understand the 
relationship between truth and 
power, it’s helpful to borrow from 
Foucault’s theory of “regime of 
truth.” To quickly reduce his 
writing: What we conceive as 
truth isn’t absolute; it’s influenced 
politically and has an agenda. The 
struggle for power in the public 
sphere is based upon claiming 
heir to truth. This isn’t to make 
an argument that all truth is 
totally relative, subjective and 
individuated. It is possible to 
create a universal theory; however, 
we should not expect this to 
come from our political arena. 
As I previously discussed, groups 
focused on political actions are less 
concerned with representing the 
whole truth than with convincing 
the masses and policy makers that 
their version of truth is correct. 
Rather, we can use the arts as a 
lens to construct these coherent, 
comprehensive worldviews.

The television show “Atlanta” 

is a good example of how art 
can bolster our discourse. The 
show has a clear political bent; 
Donald Glover’s character often 
acts as a proxy for the show’s 
liberal audience. Additionally, it 
has other aesthetic goals beyond 
representation, such as humor 
and drama. However, the show 
does a lot of important work, 
like not breaking police brutality 
down into a simplistic Black-
white binary. Early in the series, 
Paperboy, an aspiring rapper, is 
leaving jail when a Black police 
officer recognizes him and asks 
for a photo. The officer poses with 

Paperboy by holding his fingers 
together in the shape of a gun; 
the rapper is clearly nonplussed 
by the officer’s lack of sensitivity. 
As the two talk, the police officer 
gleefully reveals that he arrested 
famed Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane 
and doesn’t connect the dots 
between Gucci and Paperboy’s 
similar plights.

In this short scene, “Atlanta” 

demonstrates how people of color 
are incorporated into systems 
of oppression, which is an 
important nuance often left out of 
discourse about police brutality. 
I 
recall 
some 
conservative 

commentators 
claiming 
that 

race could not have played a role 
in Freddie Gray’s murder due to 
the fact some of the cops were 
Black. This demonstrates just 
one deleterious effect of leaving 
out important nuances like these 
in our public conversation.

Similarly, the show doesn’t 

shy away from presenting how 
prejudices, such as sexism and 
homophobia, exist within the 
Black community. These problems 
exist in all communities, but they 
morph depending upon their 
social context. It’s important to 
recognize that “Atlanta” is about 
Atlanta and tells a specific story 
that is underpinned by geographic, 
cultural 
and 
socioeconomic 

locations. Thus, we shouldn’t use it 
as a synecdoche for Black America. 
At the end of the day, this show 
is a single data point, but it does 
add important nuances to our 
conversation and is accessible to a 
wide audience in a way that other 
discursive modes aren’t.

Discussions of race are often 

based around the truth proffered 
by civil rights groups, which are 
extremely important, but don’t 
represent the entire truth. They’ll 
occlude facts and perspective that 
don’t advance their goals. This 
is true in all realms of policy. We 
can’t fully understand the effects 
of NAFTA solely by looking at 
employment statistics. We need 
to understand people’s narratives 
and communities’ responses to 
increasing globalization. If we 
want to have a full conversation 
about the issues in our world, 
we can’t rely on purely political 
sources of truth. Art like “Atlanta” 
isn’t the only way to end the 
discursive essentialism, nor is it 
necessarily the best way, but it 
provides an important first step.

Roland Davidson can be reached 

at mhenryda@umich.edu

