Welcome to the return of our war on voting series, a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
All the white voters in Maricopa County, Arizona—Republican, Democrat, and independent—got a lesson about voter suppression when their privilege didn't save them from standing in a line for four or five hours along with all the people of color that are usually the victims. Those long lines were a result of the Republican elected officials in Arizona having decided to close 70 percent of the polling places in this county, which just happens to have a significant population of people of color. How could they get away with it? Because of the Supreme Court. Here's the story.
Election officials said they reduced the number of polling sites to save money—an ill-conceived decision that severely inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of voters. Previously, Maricopa County would have needed to receive federal approval for reducing the number of polling sites, because Arizona was one of 16 states where jurisdictions with a long history of discrimination had to submit their voting changes under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This type of change would very likely have been blocked since minorities make up 40 percent of Maricopa County’s population and reducing the number of polling places would have left minority voters worse off. Section 5 blocked 22 voting changes from taking effect in Arizona since the state was covered under the VRA in 1975 for discriminating against Hispanic and Native American voters.
But after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013, Arizona could make election changes without federal oversight. The long lines in Maricopa County last night were the latest example of the disastrous consequences of that decision.
Voters all over Maricopa County suffered, though some predominantly Latino areas in the county had no polling places at all. This is pretty much the definition of an activist Supreme Court at work and restoring voting rights is just one of the many reasons we need a Democratic White House and Senate.
Below, you'll find some briefs about what's happened this week in the war on voting.
- Kicking things off with some good news, West Virginia might become the third state—after Oregon and California—to automatically register people getting driver's licenses or state IDs to vote. The bill has gone to Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat.
- The constitutionality of the voter ID law in Texas, which is currently stayed, is going to be heard in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court in May before the full panel of 15 judges—with a definite conservative bent. That means the law, which a smaller panel of judges on the court previously halted after finding it discriminatory to black and Latino voters, could be in effect for this year's election.
-
Nevada will finally be complying with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) thanks to a lawsuit from La Raza and the NAACP. The law intended to make it easier for people to register to vote, allowing those applying for all kinds of public assistance or getting or renewing a driver's license to register. The state wasn't doing that, for all these years.
-
Wisconsin's strict voter ID law—which passed in 2011 but has been delayed by legal challenges—will be in effect for the first time in April's primary. It will also go forward illegally, because the law required that the state run a public-service educational campaign to provide information to voters on the ID required.
But Wisconsin has failed to appropriate funds for the public education campaign. The result is that thousands of citizens may be turned away from the polls simply because they did not understand what form of identification they needed to vote.
Volunteer groups have been trying to get the message out, but don't have the necessary resources to reach all of Wisconsin's voters. "We've heard from a number of people who have said they didn't have enough information about the law," Andrea Kaminski, the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said. "They're surprised they didn't see anything on TV, on the Internet."
- Also in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed a new voter registration law which purports to be making registration easier by putting it online, but contains a provision that effectively prevents community groups from organizing voter registration drives.
Local and national groups, including Project Vote, joined together to show lawmakers that the proposed online registration system would not be available to all eligible electors, disproportionately impacting students, veterans, older individuals, low-income people and people of color. We explained that it is community registration drives that often register the very people unable to use online registration.