In her famous dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg compared gutting the Voting Rights Acts enforcement mechanism when it was working to casting an umbrella aside during a rainstorm because you remained comfortable and dry outside. Texas got soaked first. Its fucking crazy…. Within minutesliterally minutesof that ruling, Texas imposes the most onerous voter ID law in the nation, said former congressman and presidential hopeful Beto ORourke, who represented a heavily Latino district including El Paso. The new law disproportionately affected Latinos, who were the largest contingent among the 600,000 voters estimated to suddenly lack the necessary documentation to cast a ballot. Students were affected as well. Racial gerrymanders, voter purges, shuttered precincts, and more would quickly follow.
Texas has been a laboratory for this, said ORourke. The state has a long tradition and legacy of voter suppression from the top…. But since Shelby, there have been 750 polling place closures… a factor of twice any other state. As you can guess, theyre focused in the fastest-growing Black and Latino communities. The resulting plunge in turnout, he said, has been devastatingly effective…. On the eve of the 2018 election, Texas was either fiftieth, or near fiftieth, in voter turnout. Its 100 percent not an accident and not for love of democracy, but 100 percent by design.
And Texas was just on the vanguard of the new body of voter suppression tactics. The states previously covered by preclearance, together with the states gerrymandered under enduring GOP control, moved with astounding speed to pass laws that locked in Republican advantages and built a labyrinth designed to keep students, young people, African Americans, Latinos, and other demographic groups potentially sympathetic to Democratic candidates from voting. Twenty-five states enacted restrictive voter ID bills, or tightened measures that were already in place. Partisanship, race, and rising minority voter turnout were, once again, central to these proposals. Some states, including Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee, fine-tuned the restrictions in these laws several times between 2014 and 2020. By 2016, Brennan Center researchers found, 14 states enacted restrictions for the first time during a presidential election, including former preclearance states such as Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, as well as two REDMAP gerrymandered states: Ohio and Wisconsin. By 2017, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, and New Hampshire had created burdens as well. Between 2014 and 2018, more than 32 million Americans were purged from voter rolls nationwidea massive rollback, disproportionately affecting voters of color, and overwhelmingly in the states no longer subject to preclearance.
We gave up on our ideas. We gave up on our values. All we had left was just to game the system against the voter.
When North Carolina greenlighted its monster voter suppression package in the wake of Shelby, Tom Apodaca, then the chairman of the state Senate rules committee, told reporters that with the legal headache of preclearance removed, now we can go with the full bill. Early voting days were whacked in half. One of the days cut was Sunday, the most popular day for turnouts at Black churches and Souls to Polls rallies. The states GOP lawmakers also ended same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds. Barber, as president of the state NAACP, filed a lawsuit arguing the measure had been targeting Black votersa court agreed, ruling that the measure had done so with almost surgical precision.read more
Inside the Republican Plot for Permanent Minority Rule
