Diverse states are more likely to pass voting restriction legislation

15th August 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found significant evidence that racial resentment does play a large part in the sponsorship of legislation aimed at restricting voting rights.

In the study, titled, “Patterns in the Introduction and Passage of Restrictive Voting Bills Are Best Explained by Race” and released earlier this month, researcher Kevin Morris discovered during a study of voting-restriction legislation sponsored and passed in 2021 following the 2020 presidential election has been concentrated in the whitest parts of states with large amounts of racial diversity.

In addition, Morris found that race and a given legislative district’s level of racial resentment correlate with the prevalence of such legislation to a level that goes above and beyond simple party affiliation electoral competitiveness.

In short, the study found that racially based anger has spurred the whitest parts of the country to produce leaders who want to restrict voting rights.

Morris said that while partisanship and race have long been entwined – with most people of color identifying as Democrats and the majority of whites being Republicans since the Civil Rights Movement – and that voting and access to democracy have also become highly partisan in recent years, his findings do not simply fall along the Republican-Democratic continuum. The causes of voting restrictions run much deeper.

“Our analysis makes clear that this is not the case,” Morris wrote. “The recent trend of restrict­ive voting laws lies at the intersection of race and partisanship. We are not seeing these bills introduced and passed everywhere that Republicans have control. Rather, they are most prevalent in states where they have control and where there are significant non-white populations [italics in original.]

“Similarly,” he added, “it is not just that Republican-leaning legislative districts are repres­en­ted by lawmakers who sponsor these bills. The sponsorship of these bills is concen­trated in the whitest parts of the most diverse states. Further, consistent with established scholarly theor­ies of racial threat, we find evidence that race and racial resent­ment matter above and beyond the influ­ence of partisanship.”

Morris and his colleagues used Harvard University’s 2020 Cooperative Election Study, which uses two key questions that produce data revealing the levels of racial resentment, findings commonly used by political scientists. A key facet of the NYU study’s findings is that states with predominantly white populations, regardless of which party is in power, were unlikely to introduce and adopt legislation with individual voting restrictions; it’s actually the most diverse states in which voting rights are being restricted. In these diverse states that are controlled by the GOP, the higher levels of racial animus that is found in largely white districts spur these white areas’ representatives to push to institute voting bills, many of which disproportionately restrict the voting rights and access to democracy of people of color.

Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights program, said in an email to The Louisiana Weekly that while attempts at restricting access to democracy are often fueled by accusations of voting fraud, especially the preponderance of election lies after the 2020 election, such falsehoods don’t tell the whole story of voting restrictions.

The dismaying results of the Brennan Center study weren’t much of a surprise to the researchers, Morales-Doyle said. However, the extent and clarity of their results showing the seeming correlation between racial resentment, diversity and voting-restriction legislation was somewhat stunning.

“In certain instances, we think it’s clear that restrictive legislation has been introduced for racially discriminatory reasons, and in response to voters of color exercising political power,” he said. “Still, we were a little surprised at how clearly the data matched up with that theory, and that race was so clearly playing a role independent of party.”

Morales Doyle said restrictive bills were introduced in 49 states in 2021, and while the NYU researchers “are not making any claims about how many of those hundreds of bills were introduced due to an area’s race or racial resentment. We are saying that when we look at the trend as a whole, race is a powerful factor in explaining patterns in the sponsorship of restrictive legislation.”

In terms of Louisiana specifically, Morales-Doyle said the Pelican State didn’t success pass any restrictive voting laws is 2021, although three such provisions were introduced in the State Legislature.

However, he added that the study doesn’t specifically address any particular state; instead, the study looks at American democracy throughout the country.

“[O]ur study does not make any conclusions about the motivations behind any particular piece of legislation or the legislature of any particular state,” he said. “Instead, it demonstrates that, when we look at the nation as a whole, race and racial resentment play an important role in shaping where restrictive legislation is being introduced and passed, beyond partisan demographics.”

Other scholars are keen to examine and evaluate the new Brennan Center study. Brandon Davis, an assistant professor of political scientist with expertise in race and gender studies, told The Louisiana Weekly that the Brennan Center can be viewed in research that has taken before the new study.

Davis said other research has found, for example, that racial resentment correlates with less support for felon enfranchisement and greater support for voter ID, especially on the part of Republicans and other conservatives.

In addition, he said, many researchers believe that the election of Barack Obama “unleashed a white backlash in the form of the Tea Party which crescendoed into the MAGA movement. The scholarship on racial resentment supports the argument that [racial resentment] is a major factor in voter suppression tactics, but we should not consider it the catalyst for all voter suppression tactics.”

For example, Davis said, housing red-lining and other methods of enforcing racial segregation has resulted in most Blacks living in segregated communities, and added that both parties use majority minority districts “to box out their political rivals,” a tactic that effectively causes a reduction in the amount and quality of Black representation in government.

Davis also noted that the Brennan Center study suggests a “racial threat effect,” a hypothesis that “suggests that the size of the Black population is proportional to white hostility towards Blacks.

“Researchers argue that whites fear being governed by Blacks and that this fear is the basis for the racial threat whites feel toward them,” he added. “This effect also extends to other minority populations. … For example, an increase in the size of a state’s immigrant population is associated with the adoption of increasingly harsh immigration policies and whites who live in areas with large Latino populations harbor more prejudice toward Hispanics than their white peers.”

He added that “t]he threat must only be anticipated, rather than actual, to produce these effects. This last point highlights the significance elites and the media play in promoting racist and xenophobic narratives, stoking fear of racial minorities and immigrants.”

Morales-Doyle said that even though the country hasn’t even reached the first federal election since the massive wave of voting-restrictive legislation of 2021 and since, and evidence of mass rejection of mail-in votes and other non-traditional ballots, especially in diverse but GOP-controlled states like Texas and Georgia. And that does not bode well for the state of American democracy.

“Race has always played a central role in the fight over voting rights in this country,” he said. “But the wave of restrictive legislation we saw last year is the worst we’ve seen in generations, and it threatens to have a huge impact on voting rights. … And we know that restrictions on voting often place disproportionate burdens on voters of color. A healthy democracy is a racially-inclusive democracy, especially in a country as diverse as ours.”

This article originally published in the August 15, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.