The 45-mile drive from Union Springs, seat of Bullock County, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, might not seem very arduous. But for some locals, the distance itself is not the main obstacle. Going to Montgomery, as some now must to get a driver’s licence, means the best part of a day off work for two people, the test-sitter and his chauffeur (there is no public transport). That is a stretch for employees in inflexible, minimum-wage jobs—and there are lots of them in Union Springs, a tidy town in which the missing letters on the shuttered department store’s façade betray a quiet decline, surrounded by the sort of spacious but dilapidated poverty characteristic of Alabama’s Black Belt. To some, this trek is not just an inconvenience but a scandal. The state’s voters must now show one of several eligible photo-IDs to cast a ballot, of which driving licences are the most common kind. Last year, supposedly to save money, the issuing office in Union Springs, formerly open for a day each week, was closed, along with others in mostly black, Democratic-leaning counties. After an outcry, the service was reinstated for a day per month; at other times, applicants head to Montgomery. For James Poe, a funeral-home director and head of the NAACP in Bullock County, the combination of a new voter-ID law and reduced hours is “insanity”. Such impediments may not be as flagrant as when, as a young man in Union Springs, he had to interpret the constitution in order to vote, but, he thinks, they are obnoxious all the same.
For Mr Poe, the explanation of what he calls “a slick Jim Crow” is simple: “Republicans want fewer people to vote.” Far from it, insists John Merrill, who as a Republican legislator helped craft the new law and now oversees its implementation as Alabama’s secretary of state. Anyone without a driving licence can apply for a free, alternative ID—in Union Springs, at the friendly registrar’s office in the courthouse. True, fewer than 8,000 have been issued, but that, Mr Merrill says, is because not many people need them (others disagree). He pledges to ensure that anyone who wants an ID gets one, even if he has to go to their house himself. Turnout soared in the recent primary, he points out (though only on the Republican side). As for racial discrimination at the polls: “That day is over.”
The nuances, malleable data and emotive claims in the row over Alabama’s voting law are typical of similar disputes raging across the South, in and out of court, and elsewhere. Some might not be resolved before the presidential election and may cloud its outcome. At their heart is the question of how far America has escaped the racial traumas of its past.
Altogether 17 states will have new rules in place for this presidential election. Reverend William Barber, a civil-rights activist who is leading the fight against North Carolina’s changes (among the most sweeping), shares Mr Poe’s outrage. These are, he says, summarising the general complaint, “an all-out retrogressive attack on voting rights”, which his generation must defend, just as a previous one secured the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965. Thus his slogan: “This is our Selma.”
Full Article: The fire next time | The Economist.