Congress is currently (as I write this) working on a voting-rights bill. It’s depressing having to say that, because we thought it was done already, years ago, back in 1965.
It happened in the wake of a horror known as Bloody Sunday, when state troopers and local police brutally attacked a group of civil rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, leaving many injured. The activists had planned to walk from Selma to the capital in Montgomery to press for voting rights, which had been ruthlessly curtailed in the Jim Crow South since the defeat of Reconstruction.
The temporary win for the anti–voting rights side in Selma turned into a longer term loss because there were TV reporters in town for the march, and that meant the whole country was able to see the violence and repression from their own living rooms. There was a shift in public opinion, and Lyndon Johnson seized the moment to urge Congress to pass a voting rights act, which it duly did.
Happy ending!
It wasn’t quite that simple, of course; there was still resistance and arguing and refusal to comply. But at least the framework was there. The law was on the books, so redress could be sought. Actual, on-the-record progress had been made—so, by one of those absurd ironies of history that keep making us do pratfalls, the fact that progress had been made became the reason for reversing the progress, because, hey, we’ve already made the progress.
Acting on this complacent view of things, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) is unconstitutional. Section 5, the Brennan Center for Justice explains,
is a key part of the Voting Rights Act, requiring certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to submit any proposed changes in voting procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal district court in D.C.—before it goes into effect—to ensure the change would not harm minority voters.
In other words, the bag of tricks that had been used for generations to make it almost impossible for Black people to vote was no longer available. If legislators in a jurisdiction with a history of using that bag of tricks tried to use it again, they had to run their new law past the Department of Justice or a federal district court, in a process called “preclearance.” Mostly the feds said a big Nope to such attempts.
But that was then, the Shelby ruling said, and that key part of the VRA is no longer needed because things are different now. It strikes a lot of people as like saying you don’t need fire insurance because look, nothing is on fire. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent remarked that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
So how has that been working out? Is anything on fire or drowning? The Guardian reported in June 2020 that “Between 2012 and 2018, there were 1,688 polling place closures in states previously covered by section five of the Voting Rights Act.” That’s just one example; there are also new Voter ID laws, proof of citizenship laws, and similar ploys to discourage voting.
The pretext for all this activity is “election integrity,” but the reality is it’s all about making it more difficult for The Wrong People to vote. Which people are the wrong people? The same as they were before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the same as the people who were clubbed to the ground on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. (Edmund Pettus, by the way, was a Confederate general and a leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. There have been efforts to have the bridge renamed, but so far they have failed.) They are Black people, and also poor people, struggling people, refugees, immigrants—people likely to vote Democratic.
How is it done? The way it’s always been done—by creating obstacles from that old bag of tricks. By eliminating drop boxes, reducing voting hours, slashing the number of voting places, limiting mail-in voting, rejecting signatures. The beauty of this is that it targets poor people specifically—people without cars, people who don’t have access to buses, people with long working hours, people who can’t take a few hours off, people with childcare duties they can’t delegate to someone else. The obstacles aren’t obstacles to lawyers and bankers, but they are to workers at Burger King and Walmart, house cleaners and gardeners. Republican legislators and governors can’t completely eliminate the Black vote or the Democratic vote this way, but they can put a big dent in it. The new Senate bill is meant to reverse this ugly process.
But even as the Senate wrestles with the federal bill, state legislatures are still working hard to restrict voting. The Republican-majority Georgia legislature was the first to pass new “Make Voting Difficult” restrictions. The bill imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, allows state officials to take over local election boards, limits the use of ballot drop boxes, and makes it a crime to give water or food to voters waiting in long lines. Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill into law on March 25, complete with a photo op that appears designed to taunt the opposition.
It’s not enough that he has three White guys to his right, and another three White guys to his left, and his own White-guy self in the middle. The crowning touch is above and behind them, faintly glowing, with a U.S. flag on each side: a painting of a plantation. Subtle. He’s reminding us of the good old days, when the darkies chopped cotton all day and knew their place. Message received, Governor.