Editorials: What’s the Matter With North Carolina? | Dahlia Lithwick/Slate Magazine

North Carolina is proving itself to be the poster child for all that is wrong with modern American democracy and—with thanks to Moral Mondays—also highlighting all that may someday save it. Once a temperate and tolerant beacon of the South, the state is poised to enact a rash of inexpressibly awful legislation, rushed through a Republican legislature. Because the GOP has veto-proof super-majorities in the state House and Senate, and a Republican governor for the first time since Reconstruction, the party has been on a spree. Republican-controlled redistricting was fantastically effective. So much so that in the 2012 elections, nearly 51 percent of North Carolina voters picked a Democrat for the U.S. House, yet Republicans won nine of the state’s 13 House seats, as Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis recently pointed out. Some of the gems advanced recently in the legislature include an abortion bill tacked first onto an anti-Sharia law and then snuck in through a motorcycle safety law (new TRAP regulations may shutter all but one clinic in the state). Another bill forces all educators to teach seventh graders that abortion causes preterm birth (it doesn’t). Lawmakers also enacted legislation (described here and elsewhere as “the harshest unemployment insurance program cuts in our nation’s history”) that resulted in 70,000 North Carolina citizens losing their unemployment benefits.

Editorials: Will the GOP’s North Carolina End Run Backfire? | Rick Hasen/The Daily Beast

Anyone wondering about the importance of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling hobbling a key part of the Voting Rights Act needs look no further than North Carolina, whose Republican legislature is poised to enact one of the strictest voting laws in the Nation, one which will make it harder to register and vote, likely hurting minority voters most. North Carolina is making it harder to vote now because it can, but recent experience in Florida and elsewhere shows it is a decision North Carolina Republicans may come to regret. Until last month, 40 of North Carolina’s 100 counties were covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This meant that the state could not make any changes in its voting rules, however major or minor, without first getting permission from either the U.S. Department of Justice or a three-judge court in Washington D.C. To get approval, it was up to North Carolina to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the feds that any proposed voting changes wouldn’t have the purpose or effect of making minority members worse off.

Editorials: Can Zimbabwe’s elections be free and fair? | Deutsche Welle

Election officials overseeing Zimbabwe’s July 31 ballot insist the country is ready to hold general elections in less than a week. However, fears of vote rigging and a lack of funding are worrying Zimbabweans. “Elections will be credible, free and fair. We are ready for the elections,” Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission [ZEC] deputy chairperson, Joyce Kazeme, told international election observers stationed in the country on Tuesday (24.07.2013). Some 600 foreign observers have been endorsed to scrutinize the country’s July 31 election as well as pre-poll voting for security officials assigned to work on election day. Close to 6,000 Zimbabwean observers will also monitor voting. International observers include representatives of the African Union, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Editorials: The Aftermath of Shelby County v. Holder: Will Voting Rights Be Diminished? | CityLand

The United States Supreme Court’s June 25, 2013 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, struck down Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating a “preclearance” coverage formula that had subjected numerous jurisdictions with checkered voting rights histories to the U.S. Department of Justice’s oversight.  Although the decision allows Congress to create a new coverage formula, in today’s political climate that appears unlikely.   While the preclearance system was often associated with deep Southern states like Alabama and Mississippi, in 1971 three New York City counties – Bronx, Kings and New York – were added as covered jurisdictions, and since then the DOJ has blocked New York voting laws on several occasions to protect the rights of minority voters.  This article examines Shelby County v. Holder, its consequences for minority voting rights across the country, particularly in New York, and possible local remedies in the event of Congressional inaction.

Editorials: North Carolina Republicans Push Extreme Voter Suppression Measures | Ari Berman/The Nation

This week, the North Carolina legislature will almost certainly pass a strict new voter ID law that could disenfranchise 318,000 registered voters who don’t have the narrow forms of accepted state-issued ID. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the bill has since been amended by Republicans to include a slew of appalling voter suppression measures. They include cutting a week of early voting, ending same-day registration during the early voting period and making it easier for vigilante poll-watchers to challenge eligible voters. The bill is being debated this afternoon in the Senate Rules Committee.

Editorials: Southern Europe awaits German election in fear, hope | Reuters

Like the coming of the messiah, depressed southern Europe nations await Angela Merkel’s likely victory in Germany’s September election with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Four years into the euro zone debt crisis, people in debt-laden Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus are deeply worried that a third term in power for the conservative chancellor may only bring them more austerity and pain. The five countries that implemented Merkel’s anti-crisis recipes and cut spending massively in areas such as health and education, have been in or close to recession since 2008. Unemployment tops 27 percent in Spain and Greece. Their leaders, however, disagree. Confident that Merkel will tone down her budget cutting mantra and accept more burden-sharing within the euro zone, they are positioning themselves as close allies of Europe’s main paymaster.

Editorials: Voter ID: North Carolina Law Hurts Democrats | Nate Cohn/New Republic

One of the most frustrating discussions of 2012 was about voter identification laws. Voter ID laws seemed like they would disproportionately impact non-white, student, and elderly voters, who were widely assumed to tilt Democratic. There were big, flashy numbers about the number of registered voters without photo identification. Pennsylvania, for instance, famously announced that 759,000 registered voters didn’t have photo identification, causing a hyperventilating Dave Weigel to depict the law as “an apocalypse waiting to happen.” But voter ID laws had been implemented across the country over the last decade, and there just wasn’t solid evidence that voter ID laws meaningfully reduced turnout, let alone hurt the performance of Democratic candidates. Even the best studies were very weak, and there were states like Georgia and Indiana, where Obama excelled after voter ID laws were enacted. The consequences of voter ID laws were imperceptible. But finally, there are better numbers on how voter ID laws might influence one critical battleground state. North Carolina is considering a strict new voter ID law, so North Carolina’s Secretary of State has conducted an analysis estimating how many voters have a state-issued photo ID.

Editorials: North Carolina voter ID, other changes unnecessary | Charlotte Observer

We’ve said all along that GOP lawmakers’ push for voter ID in North Carolina was more about suppressing the votes of Democrats than tackling fraud. The restrictive N.C. Senate bill unveiled last week that some legislators are trying to ram through in the waning days of the legislative session this week proves the point. The bill reduces by half the types of photo identification that were allowed under the House version, and makes it particularly onerous for college students to vote. Under the Senate bill, no college ID card would be acceptable. The House bill does allow student IDs, but only from N.C. schools. The Senate limits acceptable IDs to those issued by the government – driver’s license, passports, non-driver IDs and military or veteran cards. The bill also eliminates measures designed to educate voters about vote law changes.

Editorials: The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent by John Paul Stevens | The New York Review of Books

… Writing for the five-man majority in Shelby County, the recently decided Supreme Court case challenging the VRA, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that “times have changed” since 1965. The tests and devices that blocked African-American access to the ballot in 1965 have been forbidden nationwide for over forty-eight years; the levels of registration and voting by African-Americans in southern states are now comparable to, or greater than, those of whites. Moreover, the two southern cities, Philadelphia, Mississippi and Selma, Alabama, where the most publicized misconduct by white police officials occurred in 1964 and 1965, now have African-American mayors. In view of the changes that have occurred in the South, the majority concluded that the current enforcement of the preclearance requirement against the few states identified in the statute violates an unwritten rule requiring Congress to treat all of the states as equal sovereigns. The Court’s heavy reliance on the importance of a “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the States,” while supported by language in an earlier opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, ignored the fact that Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution created a serious inequality among the states. That clause counted “three fifths” of a state’s slaves for the purpose of measuring the size of its congressional delegation and its representation in the Electoral College. That provision was offensive because it treated African-Americans as though each of them was equal to only three fifths of a white person, but it was even more offensive because it increased the power of the southern states by counting three fifths of their slaves even though those slaves were not allowed to vote. The northern states would have been politically better off if the slave population had been simply omitted from the number used to measure the voting power of the slave states.

Editorials: Eliot Spitzer and New York’s incumbent-protection ballot rules | Joshua Spivak/Newsday

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s surprise entrance into the New York City comptroller race highlights one issue that will be ignored — how New York laws continue to serve incumbents and the existing political system at the expense of the voters. Spitzer’s entry was a last-minute decision. He had four days to gather 3,750 signatures on nominating petitions. This may not seem to be a high bar, but obviously Spitzer didn’t agree — he reportedly paid signature gatherers as much as $800 a day to get their John Hancocks. He said he ended up with 27,000. Why did Spitzer need to gather so many? It wasn’t because he wanted to show that he had a popular following. Nor was it an example of a gross overpayment. Instead, it was simply because New York’s ballot-access laws remain convoluted enough to require candidates to get a very large cushion of signatures to prevent them from being tossed off the ballot by party regulars who know — and make — the rules.

Editorials: On Voting Rights, Discouraging Signs From the Hill | Andrew Cohen/The Atlantic

The story of voting rights in the year 2013 — how the five conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court undercut them last month and what Congress must do to restore them now — is really the story of America itself. There has been much premature self-congratulation mixed in with a great deal of denial and dissonance. There has been a widening gulf between promise and reality. Patriotic words of bipartisanship have flowed, promises of cooperation have oozed, but there are few rational reasons to believe that the nation’s representatives will quickly rally together to do what needs to be done. The premature self-congratulation came from the Court itself. Less than one year after Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act stymied voter suppression efforts in the 2012 election in Florida, Texas and South Carolina, Chief Justice John Roberts in his opinion in Shelby County v. Holder heralded the “great strides” the nation has made in combating such suppression and the fact that “blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare.” Not so rare. Before the sun set that day, June 25th, officials in Texas and North Carolina had moved forward with restrictive voting measures that had been blocked by the federal law.

Editorials: Key date for test of voting law’s preclearance requirement | Lyle Denniston/SCOTUSblog

A key date — July 26 — has now been set for a test of the Obama administration’s view on a legal mechanism for continuing to protect minority voters against discrimination at the polls — including court review of new election laws before they go into effect.  The mechanism potentially could allow the government to salvage something very significant from its defeat in the Supreme Court’s ruling last month on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. The mechanism is the 1965 law’s Section 3.  Under that provision, if a state or local jurisdiction has a recent history of racial discrimination in its elections, a court can order it to get official clearance in Washington before it can implement changes in its voting laws or methods.  This is known as the statute’s “bail in” mechanism.  The so-called “preclearance” process — for decades a very successful way to protect minority voters’ rights – comes under the law’s Section 5, and both Sections 3 and 5 are at least technically intact even after the Shelby County decision. The state of Texas has insisted that it has now come out from under Section 5, as a result of that ruling, but that claim is now being challenged in a lower-court case over new redistricting maps for the Texas legislature and the state’s delegation in the House of Representatives.  And it is that case on which the Justice Department’s views about Section 3 are to be filed by a week from tomorrow, under an order issued this week by a three-judge district court in Washington.

Editorials: North Carolina Republicans Push Harsh New Voter ID Law | Ari Berman/The Nation

As Congress held hearings this week on whether to resurrect the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the North Carolina Senate introduced a harsh new voter ID law that could be passed in a matter of days. (See my new piece on the state’s Moral Monday protest movement for how activists are resisting the GOP’s agenda.) The Senate version of the bill, posted today, is significantly tougher than the House bill passed in April. North Carolina was one of fifteen states subject to Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court recently ruled unconstitutional, so the state no longer needs to clear its voting changes with the federal government. North Carolina Republicans have acted accordingly, making a very bad law even worse.

Editorials: Togo’s election: A tale of two families | The Economist

Few Togolese would seem less likely to offer praise for their country’s political system than Gilchrist Olympio. His father, Sylvanus, Togo’s first post-independence president, was assassinated in 1963 by a hit squad led by Eyadéma Gnassingbé, who seized power in a coup four years later and ruled Togo with an iron fist for 38 years. A severe critic of his father’s murderer, the exiled Mr Olympio was twice sentenced to death in absentia. But much has changed in this country of 6m-plus people, wedged between Ghana to the west and Benin to the east, since the presidency passed to Faure Gnassingbé, the coup-plotter’s son (pictured), in 2005. Slowly but noticeably he has begun to loosen the reins. Three years ago he created a national unity government that includes Mr Olympio, who is repaying the favour by praising Mr Gnassingbé ahead of a general election, delayed from last year, that is due to take place on July 25th. “We are now in a democratic system,” he says, while gearing up to oppose the president’s party in the poll.

Editorials: Let’s enact a new Voting Rights Act | Norman Ornstein/The Washington Post

Imagine an intersection with a long history of high-speed car crashes, injuries and fatalities. Authorities put up a traffic light and a speed camera — and the accidents and injuries plummet. A few years later, authorities declare “mission accomplished” and remove the light and speed camera. No surprise, the high-speed crashes and fatalities resume almost immediately. This is the logic that animated Chief Justice John Roberts’s decision to fillet the Voting Rights Act and that had conservative pundits, including George F. Will, praising the act as they simultaneously exulted in its demise. The predictable result took less than a day: Texas reinstated its racially tilted gerrymandered redistricting plan and moved to implement its highly restrictive voter ID law, under which voters can be required to travel as far as 250 miles to get identification. The real intent, voter suppression, is clear in the legislation’s provision that a concealed-weapon permit can be used to vote but a valid student photo ID cannot.

Editorials: Renewing voting rights — with Roberts in mind | Ari Melber/The Great Debate (Reuters)

Should Congress accept Chief Justice John Roberts’ invitation? Roberts, in his dramatic voting rights ruling last month, said Congress has a duty to update Jim Crow-era civil rights laws for a post-Jim Crow world. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court basically found that Congress committed an unforced error by renewing the Voting Rights Act without updating its formula for patrolling discrimination against voters. Now Congress can finish what the court started. As the Senate holds its first hearing in response to Shelby on Wednesday, with the House of Representatives due to hold one on Thursday, there are indications that a precise piece of legislation could pass even this divided Congress. Here are two strong ways to renew the Voting Rights Act. The first thing Congress can do is update the law’s formula for hunting down discrimination. A clear bill can begin by answering the core question in Roberts’ opinion: Is there a better baseline for discrimination than the literacy tests and voter turnout numbers from the 1960s?

Editorials: Zimbabwe Electoral Commission On Course | allAfrica.com

The delays yesterday during the special voting for police and other Government officials who are likely to be deployed away from their constituencies on July 31 were a result of events, not fundamental flaws in the electoral process or its organisation. The main problem was that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission did not have a final list of candidates, with their political affiliation, until late on Friday when the results of several court cases became known. But that final list for this weekend is the same final list for the main Election Day at the end of the month. So the ballot papers that were available for special voting are the same ballot papers that will be issued on July 31.

Editorials: The Federal Election Commission’s wrong-headed proposal to change rules | The Washington Post

Immobilized by political gridlock, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has allowed its enforcement actions to nosedive in recent years. Now outgoing commission Vice Chairman Donald F. McGahn II, a former general counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee, could be seeking to take advantage of a temporary 3-to-2 Republican majority on the FEC to write Republican stall tactics into agency rules. Mr. McGahn and other Republican commissioners have proposed a version of the FEC enforcement manual that would prevent the agency’s general counsel from consulting, without commission approval, publicly available information when considering an enforcement matter. It would also severely restrict information-sharing between the FEC and the Justice Department.

Editorials: Why voter ID won’t save the GOP | Zachary Roth/MSNBC

Last month’s Supreme Court ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act has left voting-rights advocates and Democrats fearing that a potential new wave of suppression tactics could keep poor and minority voters from the polls. Voter ID laws have topped the list of concerns, with several southern states vowing to push forward with such measures now that it’ll be harder for the federal government to stop them. But a close look at the research on how voter ID laws affect elections suggests that, from a purely political point of view, the anxiety may be misplaced: The picture is murky, but there’s no clear evidence that requiring voter ID significantly reduces turnout. And some experts say that other voting restrictions—especially those that make it harder to register and to vote early—are likely to have a bigger effect.

Editorials: North Carolina redistricting decision a setback for voting rights | Brentin Mock/Facing South

This week, a three-judge panel in North Carolina voted to preserve the 2011 GOP-drawn redistricting plans that civil rights and voter groups say are racially gerrymandered. “It is the ultimate holding of this trial court that the redistricting plans enacted by the General Assembly in 2011 must be upheld and that the Enacted Plans do not impair the constitutional rights of the citizens of North Carolina as those rights are defined by law,” reads the judges’ ruling. What does this mean for voters of color and citizens of North Carolina? Well, challenging the redistricting plans was already a tough deal to begin with. Republicans drew the post-2010 Census lines to their advantage, giving themselves a 9-4 congressional district edge, up from the 7-6 split with Democrats before. They also placed roughly 27 percent of African-American voters in newly split state House precincts, compared to just 16.6 percent of white voters. There was similar disproportional segregation of black voters in the new congressional and state Senate districts. But Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice precleared the plans, more than once, when counties were still subjected to the Voting Rights Act.

Editorials: The Supreme Court vs. the Voter | Leon Friedman/National Law Journal

In the old days, the U.S. Supreme Court took strong steps to protect the right of ordinary citizens to vote. But culminating in the recent Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder decision that struck down the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court in the past decade has turned its back on protecting the franchise, especially for the poor and minority groups. In 1915, the court struck down the notorious grandfather clause established in many Southern states, which allowed persons to vote only if their grandfathers could. That was a crude device to disenfranchise the descendants of black slaves, who, of course, could never vote. In the 1940s and 1950s, the court held that the Democratic Party in the Southern states could not treat its primaries as a private affair, open only to white voters. In 1964, the court established the one-person, one-vote rule, so that states could not apportion districts in a manner that allowed rural voters to have 50 times the voting strength of their urban counterparts. In 1966, the court first upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, which established federal control over states and other political entities that had used one or another blatantly discriminatory devices to prevent African-Americans and other minority voters from casting ballots. In the same year, it struck down a Virginia poll tax law that required state residents to pay $1.50 a year for the right to vote in state elections. (The 24th Amendment, adopted in 1964, prohibited poll taxes for federal elections.)

Editorials: The Voting Rights Act and the Section 3 opt in provision | Blog For Arizona

A frequently made argument by GOP apologists, like Robert Robb of the Arizona Republic, is that Arizona should not be a covered jurisdiction under the Voting Rights Act.

Arizona failed to meet certain criteria in 1972 to get federal approval for any state legislation or procedural changes that could impact voting, which included having low voter turnout and not offering election materials in other languages. Arizona in 1974 implemented bilingual voting, but Congress never removed Arizona from the Section 4 covered jurisdiction formula in subsequent renewals of the Act. “We’re being punished for the past!”

This argument requires one to ignore the fact that Arizona has always had the opportunity to “opt out” of the covered jurisdiction formula if it could adequately demonstrate a clean bill of health for a period of 10 years without any violations for discrimination against voters. A number of jurisdictions have successfully “opted out’ over the years.

Editorials: Texas’ redistricting fight is far from over | Enrique Rangel/Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Think the Texas redistricting fight is over? Think again. Last week, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, State Attorney General Greg Abbott said the voter ID law and the redistricting plan the Texas Legislature approved were good to go. “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately,” Abbott said in a statement. “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.” But — as opponents of the voter ID law and the redistricting plan predicted after the high court ruled that Texas and other (mostly Southern) states no longer require federal approval of voting laws or redrawn maps — on Monday a federal court in San Antonio basically told Abbott: “Not so fast.”

Editorials: A New Strategy for Voting Rights | Ari Berman/The Nation

Hank Sanders grew up in segregated, rural southern Alabama and in 1971 moved to Selma—the birthplace of the Voting Rights Act. Before the VRA, only 393 of the 15,000 black voting-age residents in Dallas County, where Selma is located, were registered to vote. Less than a year later, after federal registrars arrived in August 1965, more than 10,000 black voters had been added to the rolls. Sanders experienced firsthand how the VRA transformed Selma and the rest of the country. In 1983, he became the first African-American state senator from the Alabama Black Belt since Reconstruction, representing a new majority-black district created by the VRA. Thirty years later, Sanders watched in disbelief this June as the Supreme Court overturned the centerpiece of the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. “It’s the most destructive Supreme Court decision in my lifetime,” Sanders said. “It reverses the very foundation of all the progress that we have made.” Reactions in Selma, he said, “ranged from shock to resignation.” The Court’s conservative majority struck down Section 4 of the law, which determines how states are covered under Section 5—the vital provision that requires states with the worst history of racial discrimination in voting, dating back to the 1960s and ’70s, to clear electoral changes with the federal government. Without Section 4, there’s no Section 5. The most effective provision of the country’s most important civil rights law is now a ghost unless Congress resurrects it.

Editorials: An unseemly rush to voter suppression | San Antonio Express-News

Surely, street cred in conservative circles is not worth becoming the poster child for voter suppression. Again. What’s the rush? The ink was barely dry on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act, and there was Attorney General Greg Abbott saying Texas’ voter ID law would go into effect immediately. The problem: the ink has been quite dry for a while on another federal court ruling. This one, in August 2012, said discrimination and voter suppression was written all over Texas’ voter ID law. Yet, the state is now gearing up to implement this law, and county election officials around the state are surely scratching their heads. Why would a state, whose voting numbers are nothing to write home about, want to diminish them further? Particularly since this is ostensibly to address voter fraud — a problem that substantially doesn’t exist.

Editorials: Sabotage at the Election Commission | New York Times

The Federal Election Commission is already in a state of wretched dysfunction, but it will only get worse if Republican members succeed in crippling the agency further when the commission meets on Thursday. The three Republicans on the commission appear ready to take advantage of a temporary vacancy on the three-member Democratic side to push through 3-to-2 votes for a wholesale retreat from existing regulations. Under their proposals, agency workers would no longer be allowed to routinely forward information about potential criminal violations by campaigners to the Justice Department, and the commission’s staff investigators would be severely hobbled in conducting preliminary inquiries. This would provide further aid and comfort to politicians and operatives who run roughshod over campaign laws.

Editorials: North Carolina Speeds Up to Run Election Red Light? | Michael P. McDonald/Huffington Post

Republicans are at it again, making it harder to vote. This time, North Carolina Republicans are contemplating reducing the number of days of in-person early voting, including the Sunday before the election; axing the state’s “one-stop” voting which allows people to register and vote in-person early, and implementing a new voter photo identification law that may adversely affect seniors, students and minorities. It is no coincidence that these major voting changes are being considered a week after the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in the recent decision, Shelby County v Holder. As a result, North Carolina and other states are no longer bound to seek approval from the federal government before implementing their new election laws, formerly required under Section 5.

Editorials: Bhutan at the polls: Happy and you know it? | The Economist

Arrows thud into a wooden target, and the men with bows sing in celebration. One of those watching the archery tournament is Gyeltshen, an 89-year-old who remembers Thimphu, Bhutan’s sprawling capital, as a “few houses and a forest”. Entering it without wearing your gho, a knee-length Bhutanese robe, meant risking arrest and a fine. Much is changing. He approves of how the king “granted us democracy” in 2008, when the Himalayan country had its first election. On July 13th Mr Gyeltshen will vote in the second. Like many in Thimphu, he says the ruling Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (Peace and Prosperity Party) kept its promises to build roads and airports and to provide hydro power. Almost everyone has a mobile phone, and most of the country has electricity. The party expects to win.

Editorials: Voting Rights Act ruling changes course of history | Natasha Korgaonkar/The Detroit News

In justifying the decision to quash the protections of the Voting Rights Act for African-American, Latino and other voters of color, John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court, wrote that “things have changed.” In a sense, Roberts is correct: As this nation has tumbled through time grappling with its own history, the persistence of states of the former Confederacy in suppressing African-American voting power has adapted, shape-shifted and adopted clever disguises. Efforts to extend voter suppression against Latino, Native, and Asian-American voters in these states have also proliferated. Indeed, things have changed. Of course, there has been significant progress for voters of color since 1965, when hundreds of heroes risked their lives in crossing a small bridge in Selma, Ala. — a bridge named after Confederate brigadier and “Grand Dragon” Edmund Pettus.

Editorials: In Voting Rights Act, Subtleties Matter Most | Charles L. Zelden/Huffington Post

This week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a key piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) could generate controversy in an empty bar. Amid all the anger and shouting, let’s take a closer look at the background and context of this case and the statute at its heart. The problem with what the Court did in Shelby County v. Holder is that it missed the subtle ways in which state and local governments have used their power to regulate the vote to dilute and even suppress it. The problem focuses on an early success of the VRA. In early 1969, VRA enforcement stood at a crossroads. As originally conceived, the Act attacked the wide range of voter exclusion strategies adopted by Southern states to deny African Americans access to the polls — for example, (1) unfairly applied literacy and/or understanding tests requiring voters to read, understand, and interpret any section of the state constitution to the satisfaction of a white (usually hostile) election official, (2) complicated registration requirements excluding minority voters on technical grounds and (3) financial barriers such as poll taxes. One simple way to undermine the black vote was to set up polling places in areas inconvenient for blacks for instance, in distant locations or in the middle of white sections of the town or county. By 1969, those methods were all but dead, thanks to combination of court rulings and the effective use of the pre-clearance provisions of the Act’s Section Five.