Tuesday’s decision neutering a key prong of the
Voting Rights Act leaves supporters of voting
rights in a difficult position. If they do nothing, voter suppression laws can
go into effect, and may not be struck down by the courts until after they have succeeded in disenfranchising
many voters. Yet the Roberts Court’s decision to hollow out
America’s voting rights protections also allows conservatives to exact
concessions before the voting rights regime that five Republican justices
killed can be restored.
Shortly after the decision,
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary
Committee, dropped a hint at just what those concessions could be — give the greenlight to a common
GOP-backed voter suppression law, or the heart of the Voting Rights
Act is dead forever. In an interview with CBS News, Grassley claimed he is
“open to looking at ways to address the issues addressed in the court’s
decision.” Yet he added that he believed the Justice Department was wrong to
use the act to block “common sense measures such as voter identification laws.”
Voter ID laws are not
common sense, and they are exactly the kind of device the Voting Rights Act was
enacted to prevent. Although Republicans often claim these laws are needed to
prevent voter fraud at the polls, such fraud is virtually non-existent. A study
of Wisconsin voters found that only 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of
in-person voter fraud, meaning that a person is more likely to be struck by
lightning than to commit fraud at the polls.
What voter ID laws do
accomplish, however, is removing many low-income voters, students and people of
color from the electorate — all of which are groups that tend to vote for
Democrats. The entire purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to block laws that suppress voting
among racial minorities, so the Justice Department correctly invoked
the act to hold up voter ID laws.
Now, however, Grassley’s
statement suggests that Republicans could demand that voter ID laws be given an
exemption from the Voting Rights Act before the act can be reinstated. In
essence, Republicans could block the most effective mechanism of stopping voter
suppression laws unless the new voting rights law exempts the GOP’s favorite
tactic for suppressing minority votes.
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