By hook and by crook
It’s not clear sometines whether the beleaguered 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is as dead as a Norwegian Blue or just resting. The Act, explains Democracy Docket, was not just intended to address open discrimination, but the subtle kind as well, as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1969. Chief Justice John Roberts will go down in history for eviscerating and/or weakening VRA provisions.
Even then, The VRA is not quite dead yet:
Over the past few months, pro-voting forces have brought a series of lawsuits under lesser known and rarely litigated provisions of the VRA that seek to combat some of the more “subtle” — but nevertheless pernicious — voting laws that disenfranchise citizens across the country. From Washington to North Carolina and other states in between, these lawsuits are tapping into more obscure portions of the VRA in order to protect voting rights.
You go to war with the VRA provisions you have.
Case coordinator Rachel Selzer names a few:
In Wisconsin, a new lawsuit challenges the state’s absentee ballot witness requirement under Section 201 of the VRA.
A recent federal lawsuit brought on behalf of four individual Wisconsin voters alleges that the state’s absentee ballot witness requirement contravenes Section 201 of the VRA, which prohibits denying the right to vote on the basis of a citizen’s failure to comply with a “test or device.” Section 201 defines an unlawful “test or device” as any requirement that a voter must satisfy as a prerequisite for voting.
Including “the voucher of registered voters or members of any other class.” Like a “supporting witness.”
Relying on Section 202(c) of the VRA, lawsuits in North Carolina and Washington challenge residency requirements for voting.
That 1970 provision “abolished so-called ‘durational residency requirements’ as a precondition for voting in presidential elections.” Residency is distinct from a registration cutoff.
Despite the VRA’s clear mandate, states including North Carolina and Washington require their citizens to reside in the state for at least 30 days prior to the election in which they seek to vote. Two new federal lawsuits filed on behalf of the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans and the Washington State Alliance for Retired Americans allege that their states’ respective durational residency requirements flout Section 202(c) as well as the U.S. Constitution.
[…]
The Section 202(c) lawsuits also bring claims under the First and 14th Amendments, alleging that the durational residency requirements unconstitutionally burden the fundamental right to vote without a compelling justification. Both cases cite the Supreme Court’s 1971 opinion in Dunn v. Blumstein, which held that Tennessee’s durational residency requirements “deny some citizens the right to vote” and “impinge[] on the exercise of a second fundamental personal right, the right to travel.”
Using Section 202(d) of the VRA, a Georgia lawsuit seeks to extend the time period in which voters can request an absentee ballot.
In particular, Section 202(d) stipulates that states are required to allow all qualified voters who will be outside of their election district on Election Day to cast an absentee ballot in a presidential election so long as they applied at least seven days before the election.
Georgia previously comported with this federally mandated deadline up until 2021 when it enacted an omnibus voter suppression law, Senate Bill 202, in response to record high turnout in the 2020 general election. Under S.B. 202, the latest a voter may apply for an absentee ballot (via mail, email fax or online) is 11 days before an election — four days before the VRA’s prescribed deadline.
Look closely at any voting-related statutory adjustments made by GOP-led legislatures for the subtle and not so subtle impacts. They’re trying anything and everything they can think of to suppress the vote and to make voting itself more of a challenge. Just as Paul Weyrich said so unsubtly in 1980.
Two can play at that game.