On Tuesday, for the first time in more than 50 years, Americans went to the polls to elect a president without a fully functioning Voting Rights Act — thanks to an insidious decision by the Supreme Court in 2013. Consider what has been happening in North Carolina, a battleground state with a history of racial discrimination in voting. Republican lawmakers and officials have gone to remarkable lengths to drive down turnout among black voters, who disproportionately favor Democrats. Among other things, they cut early voting hours and Sunday voting, and closed polling places in minority communities, despite significant public opposition. Even after a federal appeals court struck down the state’s outrageous voter-suppression law in July, saying that it targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision,” officials were scheming to work around it. On Monday, the state’s Republican Party issued a news release boasting that cutbacks in early voting hours reduced black turnout by 8.5 percent below 2012 levels, even as the number of white early voters increased by 22.5 percent.
In other places with similar histories of discrimination, officials have closed polling places, creating longer lines and making it difficult, if not impossible, for people in minority communities to vote. In Texas, the number of voting locations has been reduced by more than 400. In Arizona, nearly every county closed at least one voting location; about 60 percent of counties in Louisiana and numerous counties in Alabama did so as well. A vast majority of these closings would have been blocked had the Voting Rights Act not been eviscerated by the Roberts Court.
That law had required nine states and many counties with long records of voting discrimination — primarily in the South, but also in places like Arizona, Alaska and New York — to seek federal approval, or preclearance, before making changes to their laws. Hundreds of discriminatory laws and practices were blocked over the years — until 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the preapproval requirement, as applied to those states and counties, as no longer addressing “current conditions” and as an unconstitutional burden on state sovereignty.
Full Article: The Voters Abandoned by the Court – The New York Times.