North Carolina has emerged as ground zero in the battle for voting rights—with the Supreme Court weighing in last year on a law that Republicans designed in 2013 to severely limit people’s, particularly blacks’, access to the ballot. In August, SCOTUS blocked the strict law saying that it would “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The appeals court ruling struck down five parts of the law: its voter ID requirements, a rollback of early voting to 10 days from 17, an elimination of same-day registration and of preregistration of some teenagers, and its ban on counting votes cast in the wrong precinct.
The court found that all five restrictions “disproportionately affected African Americans.” The law’s voter identification provision, for instance, “retained only those types of photo ID disproportionately held by whites and excluded those disproportionately held by African Americans.”
And this week, the hits keep on coming. On Monday, lawyers sued Jones County, North Carolina, on the claim that it discriminates against black voters and makes it impossible for them to elect candidates of their choice.
The Lawyers’ Committee’s lawsuit seeks to force Jones County to switch to single-member voting districts. If the county were to be broken up into districts, black voters would make up the majority in at least one and would be able to elect a candidate-of-choice to the Board of Commissioners.
Just in case you were wondering— this is not our usual friend gerrymandering at work. This is something else, equally nefarious, called at-large voting. It means that all the eligible voters in the jurisdiction can cast their ballot for candidates within that area. In theory, that sounds like it should be a good thing but in practice it has the impact of drowning out the voters of color with a majority of white voters; who often do not support the same candidates preferred by people of color. And according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, it’s an old school trick reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.
Fewer and fewer districts still practice at-large voting. That is because courts and other decision-makers long have recognized that discriminatory methods of election, like at-large voting, enhance the discrimination that communities of color experience because of socioeconomic and other disparities in life opportunities between Black and white communities.
But in Jones County (because even though North Carolina seems less southern than some other states, it was still part of the Confederacy), it is still prevalent. Even though the county is one-third black, the black population has not seen a candidate of its choice elected for the last twenty years.
In an at-large system, each voter gets to select each county commissioner. So long as there is racially polarized voting — like exists in Jones Country — at-large systems make it impossible for minorities to elect their candidates of choice.
So here we are once again, in 2017, working feverishly to protect the black vote from suppression. And since we know that our new attorney general (who resents voting rights and people of color) is very unlikely to do anything to penalize discriminatory districts and protect the rights of minorities to vote, we can only hope that the courts will force localities to do the right thing—even if it means cases like this have to go all the way to Washington and back.