The Washington Post reported yesterday that voter suppression laws are likely already deciding elections. Catherine Rampell writes that enough voters were turned away by the plethora of suppression laws enacted or affirmed since the SCOTUS decided to gut the Voting Rights Act to have altered the results of several close elections last week.
The days of Jim Crow are officially over, but poll-tax equivalents are newly thriving, through restrictive voter registration and ID requirements, shorter poll hours and various other restrictions and red tape that cost Americans time and money if they wish to cast a ballot. As one study by a Harvard Law School researcher found, the price for obtaining a legally recognized voter identification card can range from $75 to $175, when you include the costs associated with documentation, travel and waiting time. (For context, the actual poll tax that the Supreme Court struck down in 1966 was just $1.50, or about $11 in today’s dollars.)
While the final numbers are not know, it is likely that voter turnout for these midterms was the lowest since 1942 when America was understandably preoccupied with WWII.
Rampell cites Wendy Weiser — director of the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice:
Right now, it looks like the margin of victory in some of the most competitive races around the country was as big as the likely “margin of disenfranchisement,” as Weiser puts it. That is, more people were newly denied the right to vote than actually cast deciding ballots.
She refers to several high profile contests decided by less than 2% such as the race for Governor in Kansas where Brownback won by 33,000 out of 850,000 votes cast.
We know that more than 21,000 people tried to register but failed because they lacked the necessary “documentary proof of citizenship” required by a new Kansas law. The state’s separate, strict voter ID law also had an effect: Applying findings from a recent Government Accountability Office report that examined how the voter ID law affected the state’s turnout in 2012, Weiser estimates that it probably reduced turnout this time around by about 17,000 votes.
Weisner points to similar forces at work in North Carolina and Florida where Republicans won by less than the number of disenfranchised voters, and while qualifying these assumptions, Rampell points out an ironic twist:
Of course, we don’t know how the disenfranchised would have voted, and whether their votes would have flipped these races’ results. Restrictive voting laws tend to disproportionately affect certain groups that lean Democratic — minorities, the young, the poor — but such groups do not vote exclusively for Democrats. And another group that is frequently hurt by voter ID laws, the elderly, tends to lean Republican. For all we know, Virginia’s restrictive new voter ID law actually helped Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, narrowly “steal” victory from his Republican challenger (by just 16,000 votes!) because lots of elder conservatives lacked adequate idenfication documents.
With the current make-up of the SCOTUS there is little chance we will get any relief in the Republican war on democracy. We can only hope that turnout in 2016 will be large enough to overcome the new Jim Crow laws and allow a Democratic President and Senate to control the outcome of any new SCOTUS nominations.