Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act opened floodgates for new restrictions
12th October 2020 · 0 Comments
By Jermey Duda
Contributing Writer
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of stories looking at voters’ concerns and voting issues in the 2020 election.
(Special from lailluminator.com) — It hadn’t even been a day since the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled one of the pillars of voting rights in America, and North Carolina lawmakers weren’t wasting any time.
Republican legislators had been contemplating a bill that would require photo identification to vote. The bill had plenty of support, but it had spent the past two months sitting in committee while lawmakers waited for the Supreme Court to determine whether the state could go much further.
North Carolina was among a handful of states that couldn’t change its election laws or procedures without approval from the U.S. Department of Justice. Preclearance, as the practice was known, was part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and applied only to a handful of states and counties deemed to have exceptionally troubling records when it came to disenfranchising minority voters.
On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court gave North Carolina its answer. By a 5-4 decision, the court agreed with lawyers for Shelby County, Alabama, and ruled that the formula the Voting Rights Act used to determine which jurisdictions needed preclearance was unconstitutional.
Had the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gone the other way, North Carolina lawmakers could have passed the original photo ID bill. But with preclearance no longer a factor, North Carolina was free to pass whatever it wanted. And Republican lawmakers wanted to do much more.
Now, one lawmaker said, they could “go with the full bill,” referring to more extensive omnibus legislation lawmakers had planned on the contingency that they wouldn’t need preclearance.
North Carolina was far from alone. Across the country, states and local jurisdictions that were free from the Justice Department’s watchful eye were taking advantage of their new ability to restrict voting rights in ways that had been impossible for decades. And even in places that hadn’t been under preclearance, the Shelby County ruling sent a clear signal to policymakers about where the Supreme Court stood on voting rights.
The Supreme Court had gutted a pillar of the Voting Rights Act, and the door was wide open.
Ronald Wilson, a New Orleans attorney that helps the NAACP Legal Defense Fund bring voting-rights cases in Louisiana, notes that the current DOJ is unlike others that have preceded it. “I guess the fact now that Attorney General (William) Barr is, in fact, heading the Justice Department, it may be symbolic only, but at least before they could do anything, they had to make a request, seek preclearance from the Justice Department. Now they’re not required to do that…It’s been devastating.’’
Said Marjorie Esman, who was executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana at the time of the decision, the Shelby ruling “is one of the things keeping me up at night.’’
Retrogression
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate based on race, ethnicity, language or other minority status, applies to every state, county, city and other jurisdiction in the United States. For habitual bad actors, there was an extra layer of protection in Section 5 of the law.
Preclearance required states and other jurisdictions with histories of disenfranchising minorities to seek approval from the Department of Justice before implementing any changes to voting or election laws or procedures.
Under Section 2, anyone could sue over a discriminatory law that made it harder for minorities to vote. But litigation can drag on for years, leaving questionable election laws on the books for multiple election cycles. Section 5 preempted those changes and forced the government to prove that changes didn’t make it harder for minorities to exercise their right to vote.
The Justice Department would look at a number of things when it determined whether to preclear voting changes. Attorneys would investigate the rationale for the changes and analyze their effects on groups like people of color or language minorities. They’d speak with the affected communities to get their input on the effects of a change.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who previously worked as a deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, described preclearance as an “early warning system.” One of the system’s biggest features was it forced states and local jurisdictions into a dialogue with the Justice Department about what would or wouldn’t receive approval, and then they could act accordingly, he said.
“It effectively notified decision-makers when a decision was about to take place and required the jurisdictions to compile the data to very specifically tell whether the change in question would have an adverse effect or not,” Levitt said.
If a change reduced minority voting strength or representation, the Justice Department would reject it. The term used for that reduction or dilution of minority voting rights is retrogression.
If the Department of Justice finds a law or other change was made with discriminatory intent, it would deny preclearance. Retrogression alone, even without discriminatory intent, was enough to mark a law for rejection.
Not all voting and election law changes are equal under the eyes of Section 5, even those that on their faces seem similar. For example, 35 states require some sort of identification to vote — North Carolina is the 36th, but the courts have temporarily enjoined its law — according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and those laws vary from state to state.
Arizona voters in 2004, when the state was still under preclearance, approved laws requiring photo ID to cast a ballot and proof of citizenship to register to vote. Both received preclearance, though Arizona is one of nine states whose voter ID law is classified as “strict” by NCSL. The Supreme Court in 2013 ruled that Arizona can’t require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, but left the voter ID requirement in place for state and local elections.
Yet voter ID laws in other states have been the source of some of the fiercest post-preclearance litigation in America.
The act of requiring photo ID in itself wasn’t discriminatory under Section 5. Whether such requirements were discriminatory depended on other factors, such as what kinds of identification were acceptable for voting and who was likely to use them.
Gerald Hebert, an attorney who used to work in the voting section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, pointed to Texas as an example.
Like North Carolina, Texas sprang into action virtually the moment the Supreme Court announced its decision, announcing that a photo ID law that had been blocked by a federal court would now go into effect.
Texas’s law prohibited forms of photo identification that minority voters were disproportionately likely to use, such as student IDs and state employee IDs, Hebert said. But it did allow forms of identification disproportionately used by white people. For example, 91 percent of the people who have licenses to carry firearms in Texas were white. Texas’s law permitted the use of those IDs to vote, even though they were available to noncitizens, undermining GOP lawmakers’ rationale that the photo ID law was intended to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting.
The biggest losers
Most if not all states that were covered by Section 5 have taken advantage of their newfound freedom in the wake of the Shelby County ruling. Voting rights experts say three states — Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — stand out as the worst offenders.
“If there was a TV game show called the Biggest Losers when it comes to voting rights, those three states would win hands-down every time,” Hebert said.
Hebert pointed to North Carolina’s “full bill,” which he fought in court, as one of the most egregious examples.
The bill required photo ID for people to vote. It reduced the state’s early voting period from 17 to 10 days. It repealed laws allowing people to register to vote through election day and allowing teenagers to register if they would turn 18 by election day. And it barred election officials from counting provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.
The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law in 2016, ruling that the North Carolina law’s provisions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The findings were no different on the other provisions of the bill. The 4th Circuit noted that the legislature “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” and then used that data to restrict voting rights in five ways that disproportionately affected African Americans.
Hebert said Georgia’s controversial purge of hundreds of thousands of people from the state’s voter rolls in 2017, including more than 100,000 who were removed for not voting in previous elections, likely would not have survived scrutiny from the Justice Department as well.
In 2011, the Arizona legislature approved a law that would have required people who collect and turn in other voters’ early ballots to register with the state. But the Justice Department quickly signalled that a rejection might be in the works, and the state withdrew its application for preclearance rather than risk denial.
Five years later, with preclearance no longer an issue, Arizona banned third-party ballot collection, which critics dub “ballot harvesting,” outright.
State Sen. Martin Quezada, a Democrat from the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, said many voters in his working-class, heavily Latino district miss the deadline to mail in their early ballots and don’t have time to take them to a polling place or voting center because of the demands of their jobs. So campaigns and advocacy groups will go to voters’ homes to collect ballots and turn them in.
“That was done really as a response to what happened in my part of the state, in District 29, where we had amazing volunteer efforts to help people vote,” Quezada said.
After two years of litigation, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law, in part, as a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, finding that the law had a discriminatory effect on Latino and Native American voters, and that it was designed to do so. The 9th Circuit also noted that the state had to withdraw the preclearance application for the previous bill — one of only six times the state did so out of 773 total applications — and took note of the state’s “unsuccessful efforts to enact less restrictive versions of the same law when preclearance was a threat.”
Arizona’s attorney general, a Republican, appealed the 9th Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court, which allowed the law to go into effect before the 2016 election after the 9th Circuit blocked its enforcement.
In 2013, shortly before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Shelby County, then-Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, signed a GOP-backed photo ID law in 2013. Opponents sued, but a federal appeals court upheld the law in 2016, finding no basis to conclude it was racially discriminatory.
Virginia’s General Assembly, now controlled by Democrats, voted to repeal the photo ID law this year, and Gov. Ralph Northam, also a Democrat, signed the bill.
“Literally every state that was previously covered by the preclearance provisions, every state has enacted laws that made minorities worse off,” Hebert said.
Section 2 has been an effective tool in striking down discriminatory laws. But while preclearance was a quick and preemptive process, litigation under Section 2 can be a lengthy process, as well as an expensive one for plaintiffs who must foot the bill for their own lawsuits rather than relying on the Justice Department to take action.
Parts of North Carolina’s initial post-preclearance legislation spent eight years in the courts before ultimately being struck down in 2019. In the meantime, the lawmakers elected under those laws got to spend years making policy.
“That’s justice denied because that is unquestionably justice delayed,” Levitt said.
Under Section 5, the Justice Department had 60 days to determine whether a law or voting change resulted in retrogression. Any law with discriminatory intent or effect would be rejected quickly.
In the post-preclearance world, it takes years. That not only makes it easier for policymakers to restrict minority voting rights; it incentivizes doing it as close to an election as possible so opponents have little time to go to court and get an injunction.
Some observers believe the Shelby County ruling has also caused kind of a ripple effect in places that weren’t subject to preclearance. Levitt said major litigation in states like North Carolina and Texas has left fewer resources for voting rights enforcement elsewhere. Hebert and Bruce Adelson, who helped enforce preclearance as an attorney with the Justice Department, said the ruling showed the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is hostile to voting rights, and inadvertently encouraged states and jurisdictions, even those that weren’t under preclearance, to act accordingly.
Hebert pointed to a massive voter purge in Ohio that the Supreme Court upheld last year and a 2019 law restricting voter registration activities in Tennessee, which faces a lawsuit that Hebert is part of. He wouldn’t go as far as to say Shelby County convinced the states to take such actions, but said states understand that the Supreme Court is sympathetic and is largely hostile to voting rights. Adelson noted that a recent U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected allegations of a Section 2 violation, citing Roberts’ opinion in Shelby County as its rationale.
“I do think that the decision to strike down the most effective civil rights law in the history of our country, the Voting Rights Act, in particular preclearance, sends an ominous signal throughout the nation that the Roberts court is going to not be a guardian of the voting rights of Americans,” Hebert said.
Wilson, the New Orleans civil rights attorney, acknowledged that while some administrations previously were not as “vigilant’’ about enforcing the Voting Rights Act, they “complied with it basically.’’
“It’s been bad but not this bad,’’ Wilson said. “A lot of career attorneys had been in the civil rights division, the voting division for ages. And no matter who was in office, you could always call somebody over the Louisiana section and that person would be assigned specifically to Louisiana. So you knew that person. And if there’s some changes coming about that were detrimental, right away, you’d get on the phone and call up and say, “Hey, here’s what’s coming out right now.’’
All politics is local
While statewide legislation and redistricting plans have generated the most high-profile legal battles in post-preclearance America, it’s at the local level, in counties, school board districts and in other special districts, where the effects of Shelby County are often most keenly felt.
“Most of the changes I’ve seen that really made me think, ‘Man, that would’ve been a really difficult submission,’ involve polling places, reductions in polling places, establishment of voting centers, all early voting, voting hours,” Adelson said.
Almost immediately, polling places were closed in minority neighborhoods, said Esman, now retired as executive director of the Louisiana ACLU.
Esman pointed to research conducted by Jhacova White, whose economics dissertation at Louisiana State University, found “that in census tracts that were largely African American there were fewer — and this is post-Shelby — fewer polling places per population than in white census tracts. And that held true across the state of Louisiana.”
In Georgia, 214 polling places have closed since 2012. Bryan Sells, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in voting rights, said polling place closures have been the biggest problem Georgia has faced as a result of the Shelby County ruling. Those closures are made without regard for the effects they’ll have on minority voters, Sells said, and there’s usually no way to know it’s even happening without attending the board of elections meetings where the decisions are made.
“Now those kinds of changes happen in the dark, literally in a meeting room with nobody else there,” Sells said. “It’s the kind of change that’s the greatest risk for making things worse for minority voters, the kind of change that nobody knows about.”
In Florida, only five counties were subject to preclearance — Collier, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough and Monroe.
Each of those five counties have seen fluctuations in the numbers of polling places since 2013. Hardee, with about 28,000 residents, held steady at 12 polling places between 2010 and 2014 but was down to 10 in 2018, according to state elections data. In Hillsborough, which contains Tampa, the differences were less stark, from 292 polling places in 2010 to 279 in 2014 and 275 in 2018.
Jorge Vasquez, director of the Power and Democracy Program of the Advancement Project, a multi-ethnic civil rights organization, said there has been a broader loosening of protections for minority voters statewide since the end of preclearance.
“In giving counties discretion, we’ve seen that the discretion has had an inverse impact on the Black and brown voters,” Vasquez said.
Maricopa County, Arizona, a county of four million people that’s home to the Phoenix metropolitan area, made national news in March 2016 when voters were left standing in lines for more than five hours in some cases for the state’s presidential primary. The fiasco was caused by the county’s decision to reduce the number of polling places from around 200 to 60.
Some voting rights experts, such as Adelson and Hebert, attributed the problem directly to the lack of preclearance, which likely would have precluded such a drastic reduction in polling places.
In North Carolina, county election boards in Forsyth and Pasquotank counties, both home to historically black colleges and universities, closed early voting sites on college campuses. Pasquotank was one of the state’s 40 counties that were under the preclearance requirements. Other counties, some of which were subject to Section 5 and some of which weren’t, limited early voting hours and voting sites on college campuses.
Said Louisiana’s Esman: “Cutting back on hours for voting, shaving an hour off Election Day voting, you know, that’s a problem. People work all day. They can’t take off, and then they got to go home and feed the kids, and then they want to go vote,’’ she said. “…These things happened, and I don’t think they’re coincidental. I think that they happened as a direct consequence of Shelby.”
Special districts for things like school boards, community colleges and utilities were another area where preclearance prevented discriminatory practices at the local level.
At-large voting, in which voters in an entire city, county or other jurisdiction select representatives instead of voting district by district, was long a red flag for the Justice Department as a way to disenfranchise minority voters.
For the first time, African Americans in 2010 won the majority of the seats in the Sumter County School Board in south Georgia, which is about half Black and half white. A year later, Georgia’s legislature responded by adding two new at-large seats to the school board. The Justice Department denied preclearance to the law, but the legislature reinstated them in 2014 after the Shelby County ruling. A legal challenge to the change is still pending.
Just because an entire state wasn’t covered by preclearance doesn’t mean statewide changes didn’t need Justice Department approval. North Carolina, for example, wasn’t covered statewide, but 40 of its 100 counties were, which ultimately required preclearance for any statewide changes.
Not every previously covered jurisdiction has used the absence of preclearance to tamp down on minority voting rights. Some have gone in the other direction.
Two townships in Michigan with large numbers of Spanish-speaking residents had been covered by Section 5. But Michigan has seen an expansion, rather than a contraction, in voting rights since the Shelby County decision. In 2018, voters approved an amendment to Michigan’s constitution that enacted automatic voter registration when people renew their driver’s licenses, allows same-day voter registration up through election days, permits absentee voting without a reason, and reinstated straight-ticket voting that Republican lawmakers had eliminated.
The test to come
The changes that Shelby County has permitted may pale in comparison to the test that’s coming next year — redistricting, which Adelson called the Justice Department’s “red alert” issue when Section 5 was in effect.
For some previously covered states, 2021 will mark the first redistricting since the end of preclearance. And those who are watching closely to see how minority voters will fare under the new congressional and legislative districts are concerned.
“This is uncharted voting territory, in a sense. It’s the first time without Section 5 in a long time,” Adelson said.
Other previously covered states decided not to wait for the decennial redistricting process following the 2020 Census to start redrawing district lines, giving a preview of what may be coming next year.
Georgia’s Republican-controlled Legislature took advantage of preclearance’s demise to engage in some mid-decade redistricting. After two white Republican state legislators in districts with growing minority populations barely won re-election in 2014, their colleagues in the General Assembly performed a mid-cycle redrawing to swap out heavily Black and Latino areas in their suburban Atlanta districts.
An unenforced Louisiana law from 2010 that never received preclearance went into effect after the Shelby County ruling that allowed the Iberville Parish School Board near Baton Rouge to redraw its district boundaries, going from 13 members to eight districts and one at-large seat.
“What I’m worried about most is that in order to now invalidate discriminatory redistricting plans, we’re going to have to go to court, and it’s very costly, it’s very time consuming. A lot of groups don’t have the kind of resources necessary to litigate those,” Hebert said.
Levitt said one of the most valuable services that preclearance provided was to push back against incumbents protecting their own districts. Without preclearance, he worries what will happen next year when legislatures in previously covered states redraw their congressional and legislative districts.
“I am very afraid that when all the knives come out at once, we don’t have the tools to make sure that we are amply defended against the exceedingly powerful incumbent incentive,” Levitt said.
And while it can be difficult to challenge a statewide redistricting plan in court, it’s harder to track changes in tens of thousands of local jurisdictions. When it comes to local redistricting plans, where officials can be just as determined to protect their incumbency as any state legislator, Levitt said it’s often difficult to know where to fight.
Gone, but not forgotten
Absent any federal action to restore the preclearance requirement, some states are moving to protect minority voting rights.
The newly minted Democratic majority in Virginia’s General Assembly is contemplating a state-level preclearance requirement. A bill introduced in the 2020 legislative session would have required certain cities and counties to convince the courts or Virginia’s attorney general that local election changes wouldn’t have a racially disparate impact. The proposal passed both legislative chambers, but failed late in the session as lawmakers tried to work out minor differences.
The bill’s main patron, Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, said he intends to bring it back in 2021, saying it’s important for localities to think about racial impacts even if there’s no discriminatory intent.
“We want them to have to take these things into consideration,” VanValkenburg said. “Because when they don’t, we see that minority voters are often the first ones disenfranchised.”
Some voting rights experts are hopeful that federal preclearance can make a comeback as well.
Technically, the Supreme Court only struck down the formula used to determine which jurisdictions needed preclearance. It was Section 4, which contained that formula, not Section 5, which mandated preclearance for bad actors, that the high court found to be unconstitutional.
That means Congress can re-authorize preclearance under a new formula — or at least it can if the House of Representatives, Senate and White House all agree.
Thus far, that has been far from a reality. In previous years, Republicans were overwhelmingly supportive of the Voting Rights Act. The most recent reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act occurred in 2006, with most House Republicans voting for renewal and the Senate approving it unanimously.
More recently, however, the GOP has been hostile to the idea of reconstituting the preclearance requirement. Republicans controlled the House of Representatives at the time of Shelby County, and have since taken the Senate and White House, though the House is back in Democratic hands as of 2019.
The House in December passed legislation that would restore preclearance and update the criteria used to determine which jurisdictions need Justice Department approval. After longtime Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis died in July, House Democrats moved to rename the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020. Lewis and other civil rights marchers were brutally beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., during a 1965 march for the original Voting Rights Act, and Democrats are pushing to pass the bill, which has little support from Republicans, in his honor.
Hebert is hopeful that, if former Vice President Joe Biden defeats President Donald Trump in November and the Democrats take control of the Senate, preclearance will once again become a reality next year.
This article originally appeared on the Louisiana Illuminator (lailluminator.com), as part of a series entitled, Battle for the Ballot. Louisiana Illuminator is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization driven by its mission to cast light on how decisions are made in Baton Rouge and how they affect the lives of everyday Louisianans, particularly those who are poor or otherwise marginalized. Lisa Sorg of NC Policy Watch, Jarvis DeBerry of the Louisiana Illuminator, John McCosh of the Georgia Recorder, Ken Coleman of the Michigan Advance, Michael Moline of the Florida Phoenix and Graham Moomaw of the Virginia Mercury contributed to this report.
This article originally published in the October 12, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
