Last week, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston bragged that during the recent redistricting process, legislators had taken great care to abide by procedures laid out in the federal Voting Rights Act. The result, he said, was an outcome fair to all Georgians, including minority voters.
Today, thanks to a five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, the procedures that guided our legislators are no longer in effect because, we’re told, they just aren’t needed anymore.
“Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” the court ruled. “Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voter turnout and registration rates in covered jurisdictions now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.”
All of that is true. We’ve come a long way, particularly here in the South, and it’s important to note and celebrate that progress. The question is whether that progress will be sustained now that Georgia lawmakers no longer have sections four and five of the VRA to fall back upon as guides. For the most part, Democrats worry that it will not. As U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta warned, the ruling “put a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act.”
However, while Republicans welcomed the court ruling, in an odd way they may have the most to lose from the decision. They have chafed under the VRA’s restrictions and resented the stigma it put on Georgia and other areas deemed to have a history of segregation. But as Ralston indirectly acknowledged, the VRA also protected Republicans from temptation.
For example, a decade ago I too believed that Section 5 of the VRA might be outdated and that its protections were no longer needed. The passage of harsh voter-identification laws in Georgia forced me to reconsider, although those laws were later modified under legal pressure.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I see supposedly small-government, anti-bureaucracy Republicans propose a law such as voter ID that increases government expense and paperwork and imposes new burdens on citizens, I wonder. When the evidence they cite to justify those new obstacles turns out to be bogus, as it did in this case, wonder turns to cold suspicion. Conservative claims notwithstanding, there is simply no evidence of in-person voting fraud on a scale that would justify the obstacles created by voter ID. (The real threat to ballot security lies in absentee balloting law, which has been weakened by Georgia Republicans.)
And of course, when those new obstacles to voting just happen to put a greater burden on minority, presumably Democratic voters, that suspicion about motive hardens further. Voter ID laws, like shorter early-voting hours, are an attempt to game the electoral system by discouraging turnout at the polls, and that’s plain wrong. And while the VRA did not prevent such laws outright, conservative legislators in Georgia and elsewhere did have to keep it in mind as they drafted and passed legislation. It forced them to moderate.
Nonetheless, leading up to the 2012 election cycle, Republicans around the country had cause to hope that voter ID laws, shorter poll hours, laws to discourage college-age voting and similar steps might suppress turnout to their advantage. It turned out to have the opposite effect. Angered by such steps, minority voters actually increased their participation even over 2008’s historic levels, which is one reason why conservative pollsters did so poorly in predicting the outcome.
You could even make a strong argument that the 2012 results validate Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling. When Republicans overreached, not just in the South but also in places such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, minority voters turned out to punish them. In effect, they proved they can make the system work for them without the VRA’s intervention.
Here in Georgia, it will be interesting to see what Republicans do now that they’ve been freed of the shackles of Section 5. Will they step up their crusade to undercut black political power in Fulton County? Will they try to tinker with electoral laws to cement their grip on power and minimize coming demographic changes? With the Department of Justice no longer looking over their shoulder, we’ll get to see just how far we’ve really come.
