The wizardry of skewing elections isn’t about fraud. It’s about determining who votes.

There’s a memorable scene in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy confronts the Wizard and demands that he keep his promise to send her home to Kansas. It is a fearsome sight, with the scary face of the Wizard floating amid swirling flames.

Then Dorothy’s dog, Toto, notices movement behind a nearby curtain. He trots over and pulls it open to reveal an elderly man manipulating controls of a machine that produces the Wizard effects. Suddenly exposed, the trickster shouts, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

That’s an apt analogy for the clamor raised by Republicans from Donald Trump on down about election fraud. Elections officials take many precautions against fraud, and virtually every unbiased study has found it so rare as to be of negligible effect.

Then why the clamor? To justify the most common, most effective method of manipulating the outcome of elections: determining who gets to vote. Pay no attention to the furor about fraud. Look behind the curtain.

Our Founding Fathers were conflicted about voting. If only property owners could vote, they might oppress the rights of others. But if everybody could vote, they might restrict the rights of property owners. So they reached a solution popular among politicians of every era: they punted. Voter qualifications would be left up to the states. There was no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution.

For decades, states generally allowed only white male property owners to vote. During the early 1800s many states relaxed the property requirement. After the Civil War Blacks began to vote. An 1870 constitutional amendment prohibited denial of the right to vote because of race.

But chicanery soon emerged. In the South, whites feared the power of Black voters. States erected such barriers as the poll tax (a fee for voting designed to exclude Blacks and poor whites) and the literacy test (administered by local officials so that whites passed and Blacks failed). In addition, politically active Blacks often faced economic retaliation or violence from white terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan. Black voter participation plummeted.

In 1965 the Voting Rights Act prohibited the states from using literacy tests and other methods of excluding Blacks from voting. The effect was dramatic. Before 1965, an estimated 23 percent of voting-age Blacks were registered nationally. By 1969 the number had jumped to 61 percent.

Other methods of suppressing the Black vote arose, often promoted as protections against fraud. Voter ID laws and draconian purges of voter rolls became common.

Another practice used by both parties was gerrymandering – drawing election districts with partisan intent. North Carolina offered a museum-quality example when the Republican-controlled legislature redrew congressional districts in 2016. At a House hearing, a GOP member explained, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

A federal court struck down the law, concluding that it targeted Blacks “with almost surgical precision.”

Why do voter suppression efforts flourish? Allan J. Lichtman, author of “The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present,” has offered this explanation: “The Republican Party knows that their base is white, Christian, older men, which is the most shrinking part of the American electorate. Whereas the Democratic base tends to be among minorities, young people, nonreligious people, which are the most accelerating demographics in the American electorate. Republicans can’t manufacture more old white Christian men, but they can attempt to limit the voting of the Democratic Party base.”

That’s what’s happening behind the curtain.

This story was originally published October 23, 2020 at 12:00 AM.