In June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a long history of racial discrimination no longer needed to approve any proposed changes to their voting procedures with the federal government, as had long been required under the Voting Rights Act. That meant this year’s presidential election was the first in 50 years without the full protections of the act. What was the result? Fourteen states had new voting restrictions in effect in 2016, including strict voter ID laws, fewer opportunities for early voting and reductions in the number of polling places. These restrictions depressed turnout in key states like Wisconsin, particularly among black voters. Among advocates for voting rights, there was hope that a Hillary Clinton presidency and Democratic control of Congress would help reverse this situation. But with Republicans now in control of the presidency, Congress and two-thirds of state legislative chambers, the attack on voting rights is almost certainly going to get much worse.
A grave danger comes from the Supreme Court. If Donald J. Trump appoints a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia to fill the current vacancy, as he has pledged to do, there could be five votes to further gut the Voting Rights Act. Conservatives will target Section 2 of the law, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race or color. (This provision was successfully used to challenge voting restrictions in North Carolina and Texas this year.)
When the current chief justice of the Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr., was a lawyer in the Justice Department in the early 1980s, he led a charge against Section 2. He argued in a 1981 memo that the provision should block only those voting laws that were found to be intentionally discriminatory. This was a much higher standard (and in practice, much more difficult to establish) than showing that a voting law had a discriminatory outcome. “Violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove,” Mr. Roberts wrote. If the Supreme Court were to adopt Mr. Roberts’s 1981 position today, the country’s most important civil rights law would be effectively dead.
Full Article: Voting Rights in the Age of Trump – The New York Times.