Republican voter suppression warriors aren’t waiting for Kris Kobach and Donald Trump’s commission to start kicking qualified voters off the rolls. They’ve been out there trying to purge voting lists for years; Mother Jones does a fascinating deep dive on three such enemies of voting who work for organizations like the “American Civil Rights Union” (it’s like the ACLU, but for taking away people’s right to vote!) and Judicial Watch and the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
For years, these groups have been sending threatening letters to small, poor counties—often heavily non-white counties—telling them to purge their voter rolls or else. Since the counties rarely have money to fight back, they often just fold. And if they want to fight, they find themselves up against well-resourced former Justice Department lawyers. But it doesn’t always work out that way, and it turns out that counties that have the resources can push back pretty effectively:
In 2014, the ACRU and the Public Interest Legal Foundation targeted largely Hispanic counties in southern Texas. The first two cases were against Terrell County, a community of fewer than 1,000 people, about half of them Hispanic, and Zavala County, population 12,000 and 94 percent Hispanic. Both counties lie within Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, the only swing district in the state.
Terrell County’s sheriff signed a consent decree. But Zavala County, which sits on one of the largest oil fields in Texas history, had the money to go to court. The county hired a small team of lawyers in response to the ACRU lawsuit. Ultimately, the county and the ACRU agreed to a much weaker consent decree than other counties had. In November 2016, the ACRU, by then under Coates’ leadership, sent letters to eight more Texas counties. Four of them lie in the 23rd district, including two counties that are overwhelmingly Hispanic.
But if the voter suppressors had a little trouble with Zavala County, they may have bit off more than they could chew with a new strategy: they’re moving from going after rural counties in the South to going after blue areas in swing states. That’s the sort of thing that gets the attention of actual public interest lawyers and civil rights groups.
Their first target, in 2016, was Alexandria, Virginia, a strongly Democratic Washington suburb of more than 150,000 people. By this point, the liberal think tank Demos and other advocacy and voting rights groups had begun tracking these lawsuits. When the Alexandria suit was filed, a nonprofit law firm called Project Vote alerted the League of Women Voters, which tapped its Virginia chapter to intervene in the case, along with two attorneys from the heavy-hitting law firm Hogan Lovells. When the case went before a judge in June 2016, Adams was outnumbered—a situation he never faced in places like Noxubee County. He appeared alone on one side of the courtroom while the city’s lawyer was joined by five voting rights attorneys on the other. The judge, citing a lack of concrete numbers to back up Adams’ claims against the county, told Adams to do more research and dismissed the case.
A few weeks later, Adams and Coates filed a lawsuit against the supervisor of elections in Broward County, Florida, a population center of nearly 2 million north of Miami. In July, Adams filed a suit in Wake County, North Carolina, home to the state capital of Raleigh. In both cases, civil rights groups and labor unions quickly intervened. Instead of a quick consent decree, both cases began to lurch toward trials. In June, to avert a trial, Wake County and Adams’ client agreed to a settlement, in which the county agreed to pursue very basic list maintenance procedures, most of which it was already doing. (Adams claimed victory on Twitter.) The Broward County case is slated for trial in July and could prove a make-or-break moment for these list maintenance lawsuits.
Of course, we’re talking about a judiciary that Donald Trump is reshaping as quickly as ever he can. But there are still a lot of judges out there who aren’t going to be on board with naked efforts to disenfranchise people just because they’ve moved, or haven’t voted recently. The full article, by Pema Levy, is also a great case study in how the far right works, going on offense, often under the radar, with resources the left can only dream of.