Shelby County v. Holder

I've been reluctant to explore this rat's nest; it's complicated. But click here for an introduction to the subject in an article in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin, entitled "The Real Voting Scandal of 2016."

After discussing the struggle for civil rights in the '60s, Toobin gets around to "the real voting scandal of 2016": "This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act."

Or as the inimitable Charlie Pierce at Esquire is fond of characterizing Shelby County, Justice Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee.



As Toobin puts it:

Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.

Before the election, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said of its review of some of the most egregious changes, in North Carolina:

“Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.”

Republican state governments have, since since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, done their level best to restrict the voting rights of "those people." (Wink wink, nudge nudge.) That's because since those days, "those people" have tended to vote heavily Democratic. If their voter-restriction efforts hamper the voting ability of students and retired folks, so much the better. (When everyone votes, Democrats win.) How about if we restrict the right to vote to male white landowners?

But back to "the real voting scandal of 2016":

It’s difficult to count uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of the voter-suppression measures. In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots. (The G.O.P. likes some forms of I.D. better than others. In Texas, a gun permit works; student identification does not.) In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012 .... The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election.

To make things worse, the president-elect apparently thinks there were millions of illegally cast ballots in the recent election (although he and his lickspittles are unable to come up with even one (except for the woman in Iowa charged with election fraud for voting twice for Trump).

Toobin concludes:

Eventually, the power of perseverance, and the unifying idea of the right to vote in a democracy, brought ... a series of unlikely triumphs, culminating, in 1965, in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But the Shelby County case, and the backlash it both reflected and accelerated, reminds us that the struggle for the right to vote ... Moses, may never end.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson; it applies to everything from voting rights to freedom of the press, both of which are under attack by the administration-to-be. Keep your eyes open, people.