Maybe in the era of Donald Trump it’s too much to expect subtlety in American politics. But you’d have thought that when the Supreme Court freed a slew of southern states – states which share a grim history of suppressing and denying black and other minority voting – from federal supervision, that any return to the days of Jim Crow discrimination would have been gradual and not a headlong rush. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 – bringing electoral laws in 15 states under Washington’s scrutiny because they were incapable of doing the decent thing. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the act, with Chief Justice John Roberts declaring that intentional racial discrimination in electoral law was a thing of the past. But now the courts have shown they are on to what these Republican states are up to in the lead-in to a bitterly contested 2016 presidential election, and the direct language in some of their decisions is astounding. In a ruling against North Carolina, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit accused the state legislature of targeting African-American voters with “almost surgical precision”.
The ruling by a panel of three judges reads: “Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African-Americans.
“[The] totality of the circumstances – North Carolina’s history of voting discrimination; the surge in African-American voting; the legislature’s knowledge that African-Americans voting translated into support for one party; and the swift elimination of the tools African-Americans had used to vote and [the] imposition of a new barrier at the first opportunity to do so – cumulatively and unmistakably reveal that the General Assembly used [the law] to entrench itself. “Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination.”
Full Article: Republican vote suppression efforts, packaged as reforms, fall foul of US courts.