Reuters recently reported that the federal Department of Justice (DoJ) has slashed the number of observers to monitor the November elections. This means that it will be much harder to protect the right to vote. And there have been plenty of efforts to keep people from voting in the primary season alone. Will voter suppression mushroom?
The reason is the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without that authority, DoJ’s power to enforce voters’ rights was very limited.
Jim Crow 2.0
As I have reported elsewhere, errors, misinformation, and possibly misconduct plagued this year’s Democratic primaries. Hundreds of thousands of long-registered Democratic voters “disappeared” from the rolls in New York and Arizona Voting machines may have been hacked. And in California, election officials instructed poll workers not to give voters crossover ballots unless they asked using certain words — and not to tell them what to ask for.
State legislatures and election officials took the Shelby ruling as an open invitation use suppression tactics that the federal government would never have approved before. And minorities aren’t the only targets of voter suppression. Republicans have targeted young people and other likely Democratic voters. Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, told Common Dreams that the newest measures are more subtle than “your grandparents’ voter suppression. This is Jim Crow 2.0.”
He cited examples:
-refusing college IDs at the polling place, but accepting concealed weapons permits;
-moving polling places away from college campuses;
-eliminating same-day voter registration; and
-closing DMV offices just when high school seniors are likely to come in for their licenses.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, 17 states will have new laws restricting voting rights in effect this November. And this will be the first presidential election in 50 years without the protections of the VRA. Activist organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU are petitioning Congress to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 2867) which would restore some of the VRA’s protections.
