When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act four years ago, it gave the green light to state lawmakers eager to restrict access to the polls and eliminated the Justice Department’s role as traffic cop on whether those laws were necessary or appropriate. Activists then turned to the courts, with some success: Last year, federal judges struck down a North Carolina law mandating voters present a valid, government-issued photo ID at the polls, along with cutbacks on early voting, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the state’s appeal. While lawyers and civil rights leaders have won some big battles in fights over voter ID laws, diminished early voting and reductions in polling places, experts say the future of voting rights remains uncertain – due to changes in the political and legal landscape that swept in with President Donald Trump.
These laws are passed largely in the name of protecting against voter fraud and the president’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has said he believes it is a real danger and has pledged to aggressively fight it. Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court has next to no track record on voting rights but is a staunch conservative and could join the court in time to hear an upcoming round of challenges to restrictive new laws. And the White House is setting up a commission to investigate Trump’s charges of “massive” voter fraud in the 2016 elections, which could help rationalize more voting prohibitions. “It’s a perilous landscape,” says Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society.
Fredrickson, whose organization advocates for broader access to the ballot box, traces the changes back to the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County, Ala., vs. Holder, in which state officials challenged the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provision requiring jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to get advance permission before making changes to voting laws. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to essentially invalidate the provision, giving Alabama and other red states greater leeway on who gets to vote, a ruling that stunned then-President Barack Obama and other champions of voting rights. They argued the ruling would open the door to changes that would disproportionately hurt African-Americans and Latinos – voting blocs more likely to choose Democrats over Republicans.
“Most of the feared consequences [about Shelby] have come to pass – including attempts to: revive voting changes that were blocked as discriminatory, move forward with voting changes previously deterred, and implement new discriminatory voting restrictions,” according to an analysis at the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University School of Law think tank.
Full Article: Trump, Sessions, Gorsuch and the New Battle Over Voting Rights | The Report | US News.