Irony dies 1,000 deaths
by Tom Sullivan
Interactive map here.
“We have a right to vote,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) insisted Thursday. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee skirted committee rules and waived away objections from Democratic members to advance a bill that would allow the government to extend detentions of migrant children at the southern border from 20 days to 100. The bill is not expected to pass the House, but Graham wants what he wants.
Lindsey Graham has a right to vote. Others have a privilege contingent on his mood. Since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republicans in states they control have been of a mood to treat other people’s rights to vote as contingent as well.
In states and counties with histories of voter discrimination, 17 million voters have been purged from voting rolls over the last two years, the Brennan Center for Justice finds in a newly released study:
- At least 17 million voters were purged nationwide between 2016 and 2018, similar to the number we saw between 2014 and 2016, but considerably higher than we saw between 2006 and 2008;
- The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act;
- If purge rates in the counties that were covered by Section 5 were the same as the rates in non-Section 5 counties, as many as 1.1 million fewer individuals would have been removed from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.
The Brennan Center notes that while the overall rate of purges remained steady, outliers such as Indiana purged over 22 percent of its voters. Wisconsin and Virginia (both states with Republican-controlled legislatures) purged over 14 percent. Those rates are offset by New Mexico (1.4 percent) and California (2.8 percent).
Cleaning up the voter rolls is a necessary maintenance exercise. Wholesale purging is something else, the report observes:
States rely on faulty data that purport to show that a voter has moved to another state. Oftentimes, these data get people mixed up. In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable. Troublingly, minority voters are more likely to share names than white voters, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of being purged. Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day — after it’s already too late. If those voters live in a state without election day registration, they are often prevented from participating in that election.
One could make the sweeping assumption purges that ramped up after the election of Donald Trump have that very purpose. Jennifer Rubin thinks they might:
Voter purges are only one means of suppressing nonwhite and poor voters. Insufficient polling places (contributing to long lines and great travel distances to voting places), reduction in early-voting times, voter voter-ID laws and a host of other tactics like those we saw in Georgia’s governor race in 2018 suggest purges are part of a larger, deliberate plan that — oh look! — just happens to adversely affect voters you’d expect to vote for Democrats.
Rubin missed one:
A federal court for North Dakota on Wednesday upheld a law requiring voters to have a residential street address, rejecting a complaint by a Native American group that the law amounted to voter suppression, because many of its members had no such address.
A dissenting judge said the law had a “devastating effect” on Native American voters. Columbia University professor Katherine Franke tweeted that the ruling was a “huge setback for Native American voting rights.”
Some Americans have rights. Poor and nonwhite ones have contingent privileges.