Welcome to our war on voting series, a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.
Kira Lerner at Think Progress took note last week of Voter Suppression Battles to Watch in 2016. Among these, voter ID will be high on the list. The Brennan Center for Justice, which extensively covers voter suppression issues, reported up to May 3, 2015, lawmakers in 33 states had introduced 113 bills that to limit access to registration and voting. During the same period, at least 464 bills that would enhance access to voting were introduced (or carried over) in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Lerner writes:
Wisconsin currently has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country and requires voters to present a photo ID card. Last week, two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin began circulating a proposal to prohibit county and town governments from issuing or spending money on photo identification cards. The law would also prohibit IDs issued by cities or villages from being used to vote. Voting advocates say the proposal directly targets a plan recently approved by Milwaukee officials to issue local identification cards to the homeless, undocumented immigrants, and other residents unable to obtain state driver’s licenses or other government-issued ID cards.
• Judges says North Carolina voter ID law in effect for March primary: U.S. District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder turned down the North Carolina NAACP’s request for a preliminary injunction. He said the organization had not proved its claim that requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot would place an undue burden on blacks and Latinos. A trial date on the merits of the case will begin Jan. 25. The plaintiffs are given short odds that they will prevail at trial:
The legal wrangling over the photo ID requirement started in 2013. Republican state legislators included the photo ID requirement as part of sweeping and controversial changes they were pushing in the state’s election law. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed the legislation on Aug. 12, 2013. The legislation was pushed through soon after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that got rid of a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required certain communities and states, including in North Carolina, to get federal approval for any changes in election procedures. [...]
North Carolina’s law, considered by civil rights activists to be the most sweeping and restrictive in the country, either eliminated or reduced voting reforms that were used disproportionately by blacks and Hispanics. The law eliminated same-day voter registration, reduced the days of early voting from 17 to 10, and got rid of out-of-precinct voting. The law also did away with preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds. The state NAACP, the U.S. Department of Justice and others charged that the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional and that it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
A key reason for the judge’s decision was that state legislators made a change to the law allowing voters without ID to sign a “reasonable impediment declaration” and then cast a provisional ballot. You can read Schroeder’s 54-page opinion here.
• ACLU, Missouri NAACP say Ferguson school board election system dilutes voting power of blacks: The two groups filed suit in federal court on Jan. 11. Although 77 percent of the students in the Ferguson-Florissant School District are black, one member of the seven-member school board is black. Julie Ebenstein with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, who is arguing the case, told Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress that she’ll talk in court about the Ferguson area’s history of voters suppression, economic inequality and racial polarization have led to inadequate representation of African Americans on the board:
“This is about allowing all residents to have a say in the education of their children,” she said. “Over the past few years we’ve seen a number of decisions from the school board that don’t represent the will of the African American community. We see racial disparities in the use of school discipline, a large achievement gap in the progress of white and black students, students of color being less able to attend college. There was also a lot of publicity when the all-white school board suspended the first ever African American superintendent in 2013. Residents are still reeling from that.”