Martin DyckmanHuman intuition — aka common sense — can be a keen judge of the obvious. For example, “coffin nails” was slang for cigarettes long before the surgeon general’s statistics proved that’s what they are.
When it comes to persuading judges and politicians, it usually takes science to prove the obvious.
Today, anybody with eyes and a brain knows that the nationwide epidemic of voter-suppression legislation has nearly everything to do with race and that “voter fraud” is a pretext wrapped in a myth.
But getting the courts to act on that reality has had mixed success. The Florida Legislature’s attempt to throttle voter-registration drives was overturned, but its early-voting reduction stayed in place long enough to help discourage an estimated 200,000 voters — mostly minorities — from voting in 2012.
That particular scheme backfired. President Obama won the state again, despite a falloff in African-American votes; heavily Hispanic Dade County was irate over the long lines on election day; and the Legislature has restored early voting.
But voter suppression remains ferocious in North Carolina, where I live, and other battleground states.
Now, just in time for the ensuing lawsuits, there’s solid academic research that should not be ignored by any judge who is faithful to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Voting Rights Act.
Unfortunately, it came too late to stop the Supreme Court from mutilating the Voting Rights Act — not that reason would have prevailed on the John Roberts gang in any event.
The study, published in the current edition of Perspectives on Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association, finds direct statistical correlations to several factors:
— Anti-voter legislation is more likely to be proposed and passed where there are larger proportions of African American residents; there have been higher minority turnouts in the previous presidential elections, and increased turnouts among poor voters relative to wealthy ones. Such people prefer Democrats, of course.
— Suppression laws are less likely in states where the elderly population is growing. Older voters prefer Republicans.
“Our analyses identify a very substantial and significant association between the racial composition of a state’s residents or active electorate and both the proposal and passage of voter restriction legislation,” say authors Keith G. Bentele, a sociology professor, and Erin E. O’Brien, a political scientist, at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
“The recent wave of restrictive access legislation is rooted in long-standing racial and classist motivations revived for modern deployment.
“Our findings confirm that Democrats are justified in their concern that restrictive voter legislation takes aim along racial lines with strategic partisan intent,” they write.
Their data would be even more damning if they included laws passed after the study concluded in 2011. There was a flood of new proposals that year, following a Republican landslide in state legislative races nationwide. In North Carolina, however, Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, vetoed a voter ID bill. Her successor, a Republican, signed one into law this year that is the harshest in the nation.
As the professors acknowledge, voter suppression has a bipartisan history. Throughout the Jim Crow South, Democrats wielded an array of weapons — literacy tests, whites-only primaries, poll taxes and, not infrequently, violence — to disenfranchise blacks.
They didn’t need to grow their party because the Republicans — the party of Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction — were no threat. Even had they wanted to welcome black voters, racist whites would not have permitted it.
Today, as Bentele and O’Brien point out, the Republican Party has a similar predicament: “an unforgiving internal shift…to the ideological right and the party faithful’s response to vote fraud mythology.”
Were the Republicans to try to grow their party in the Age of Obama, they would have to broaden their appeal to women and Hispanics. But in doing so, they would court a primary election backlash from their uncompromising hard core.
“In a two-party system, when mobilizing supporters is insufficient, demobilizing opponents may provide the only route to victory,” Bentele and O’Brien say.
Some states, they note, are threatening to use felony records to purge potential black voters. They cite how Florida Gov. Rick Scott reversed Charlie Crist’s policies aimed at speedily restoring the civil rights of nonviolent offenders. It’s estimated that in Florida, along with Kentucky and Virginia, one in every five African Americans is barred from voting.
The Bentele-O’Brien article is entitled “Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies.”
That title says it all.
