President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. after signing the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1965.
This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
To commemorate the 49th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and the one year mark following the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision to gut a vital protection of the Voting Rights Act, the National Commission on Voting Rights released a new report, "Protecting Minority Voters: Our Work is Not Done." The report "challenges the Court’s rationale that improvements in minority citizens’ rates of voting and voter registration and the success of minority candidates indicated that the coverage formula protecting minority voters was unconstitutionally outdated."
The full report is worth the read, but their primary conclusions are chilling.
- Voting discrimination is a frequent and ongoing problem in the United States. There were about 332 successful voting rights lawsuits and denials of Section 5 preclearance by the U.S. Department of Justice and another ten non-litigation settlements.
- Formerly covered states in the South and Southwest stand out with some of worst records of voting discrimination–with Texas being at the top of the list. Texas stands out as having a remarkably high level of documented voting discrimination, including multiple state-level violations. And the states of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina were not far behind.
- From this report, we can also see that voting discrimination takes a variety of forms. Discriminatory redistricting plans and at-large elections continue to prompt the most successful lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. However, there were also 48 successful lawsuits and ten non-litigation settlements relating to language translation and assistance.
Yes, we knew much of this already from observing the last 15 years of concerted voter suppression efforts. But these reports are important for documenting the specific instances and building up the case for more voting rights reform when we've got a functioning Congress again.
Meanwhile, a comprehensive investigation of the supposed fraud that most voter ID laws purport to prevent finds just 31 credible claims of fraud out of one billion ballots cast. That's a fraud rate of 0.00002 percent, for those interested in the math. Note as well that each of the 31 cases involved just one or a few people—not the kind of conspiracy and well-organized effort that could actually have an effect on the outcome of an election.
More on the war on voting can be found beneath the orange butterfly ballot.
- The Department of Justice is busy this summer, trying to protect voting rights around the country: "In Texas, the Department of Justice is set for trial in September challenging the state’s voter ID laws, described by many as the most restrictive in the nation. In North Carolina, DOJ awaits a ruling on its request for a preliminary injunction barring implementation of that state’s extraordinary array of restrictive voting requirements—new ID rules, limited voting hours, scaled-back registration opportunities. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a federal judge struck down that state’s new voter ID law. But now an appeal is in the offing, and DOJ intervened in the case. Finally, in Ohio, DOJ joined a suit seeking to overturn a state law limiting early voting."
- Some 18,000 votes are on hold in Kansas's primary: Kris Kobach, the architect of Arizona's "papers please" anti-immigration law moved to Kansas and ran for secretary of state. He won, and immediately began crafting voter suppression efforts. Those efforts succeeded, and about 18,000 voters so far haven't had their votes count because they were unable to comply with new laws. Kobach handily won his primary race.
- Montana dodges voting-rights lawsuit, expands services to Blackfoot reservation: Threatened with a lawsuit, Montana Secretary of State and Chief Elections Officer Linda McCulloch figured out how to expand election services in Glacier County which overlaps with the Blackfoot reservation. A satellite elections office in Browning will serve this extremely rural community with late and same-day registration and on-site absentee voting two days per week in the month before an election.
- Illinois Republican governor candidate, GOP state chair promise massive "voter integrity" effort: Illinois GOP chair Tim Schneider says the party "will have a significant voter-integrity program" for this year's election. Candidate for governor Bruce Rauner echoed that statement, assuring a radio show caller who wanted to know how to "make sure that those who love (President Barack) Obama don't vote six, seven, eight, 10 times" that he would be "driving another initiative, and raising money for that as well, and volunteers around the state to bring a voter-integrity process to our next election cycle and put it in place for the future." He also said the state has a "massive voter fraud, voter-integrity issue." Voting experts in the state, including the executive director of the State Board of Elections, say there is no evidence whatsoever for that claim.
- Judge allows absentee votes to be counted in Dearborn, MI: Arab-American groups have contended they were singled out for voter discrimination when hundreds of absentee voter applications, many by Arab Americans, were questioned by election authorities. Additionally, potentially hundreds of Arab American voters did not receive requested absentee ballots or had their requests denied. With that background, the state sent election monitors to Dearborn for this week's primary. Following the vote, State Rep. David Nathan (D-Detroit) secured an injunction to stop counting of absentee ballots, alleging fraud. On Thursday, after an evidentiary hearing, Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert J. Colombo, Jr. lifted his own injunction, concluding that there was no evidence for fraud.