Voting Rights

The New York Times editorial board discusses voting rights after this week's Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act.

Discrimination at the ballot box continues and is growing. It comes in more forms than it did a half-century ago, but it is no less pernicious. Instead of literacy tests, we now have rigid identification requirements. Instead of poll taxes, we now have bans on early voting, cutbacks in the number of urban precincts, and groups that descend on minority districts to comb the registration rolls for spelling errors.

These measures, largely undertaken to reduce Democratic votes in the Obama period, have a direct impact on minority voters in dozens of states. But they also affect the poor of all races, older people, students and legal immigrants, increasing the need for expanded legislation.

 

I think vote suppression efforts like this will ultimately blow up in the faces of the Right as they did in the 2012 Presidential election. The predictions of a Romney landslide in 2012 by right-wing media were predicated on the assumption that vote suppression efforts would succeed resulting in lower turnout among minority groups and young voters targeted by voter ID laws. Turnout among these groups exceeded that of 2008 helping carry President Obama to re-election.

 

Why? GOP Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) recently called the right to vote "Americans' most sacred right." I agree and, apparently, so do minority voters whose ancestors bled and died for that right. There were reports out of Florida of minority voters waiting in line for hours to vote in the 2012 election, even after the election had been called for Obama, due to their determination to exercise that sacred right. Republican efforts to discourage minority voters seemed to have the opposite effect. Crudely put, they pissed them off.

Conservatrive columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times agrees.

But voter ID laws don’t take effect in a vacuum: as they’re debated, passed and contested in court, they shape voter preferences and influence voter enthusiasm in ways that might well outstrip their direct influence on turnout. They inspire registration drives and education efforts; they help activists fund-raise and organize; they raise the specter of past injustices; they reinforce a narrative that their architects are indifferent or hostile to minorities.

 

This, I suspect, is part of the story of why African-American turnout didn’t fall off as expected between 2008 and 2012. By trying to restrict the franchise on the margins, Republican state legislators handed Democrats a powerful tool for mobilization and persuasion, and motivated voters who might otherwise have lost some of their enthusiasm after the euphoria of “Yes We Can” gave way to the reality of a stagnant, high-unemployment economy.