On June 25, 2013, the US Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in its Shelby County v. Holder decision. Congress has had more than three years since then to restore the VRA’s critical protections aimed at fighting racial discrimination in voting. Indeed, legislation known as the Voting Rights Advancement Act was introduced to develop a new coverage formula and make additional updates to this landmark law. Not only has GOP leadership failed to bring it to a vote, but people like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte have outright denied the need to restore the VRA, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Now there are just 32 days left before the first presidential election in fifty years in which ballots will be cast without full VRA protections.
According to the Brennan Center, 6 of the 14 states with new restrictive voting laws in effect for the first time in a presidential election were previously covered by Section 5 of the VRA, meaning that in the past they had to get prior federal approval for any voting changes.
Even when we have won victories for voting rights, there have been attempts to resurrect voter suppression. Talking Points Memo spoke to voting rights advocates about this disturbing trend:
“You take a step back and it’s really appalling,” said Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who has been involved in many of the legal challenges to state voting restrictions.
“I mean the Department of Justice and other groups, we have all won the cases … you would have thought we would have been finished with this whole thing, when, up until Election Day, we have to stay on these people,” Ho told TPM.
. . . “There’s two things going on: One is that we have seen court-ordered softening [of voter ID laws] in places like Wisconsin and Texas, and then either foot-dragging or incompetence in carrying it out, which has led to follow-up lawsuits or threats of lawsuits,” said Richard Hasen, a professor at UC-Irvine School of Law who also runs the Election Law Blog. “The other thing that is going on is new shenanigans in response to court rulings. And that’s North Carolina.”
. . . “The trend that you’re definitely seeing is that although you may win in a court, so much of what actually matters to voters depends on implementation of a court victory,” said Jennifer Clark, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “So getting a ruling that blocks or softens a restrictive voting law is really only the first step in making sure that people have the right to vote.”
It’s painfully clear that voters are vulnerable this November. But that doesn’t mean that anyone should shy away from the ballot box. It just means that we need to be prepared. Our affiliate PFAW Foundation is part of the Election Protection coalition that is preparing voters with what they need to know to vote and what they need to do if they have a question or something goes wrong.
Failing to defend the right to vote is simply not an option.