The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision killing the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance requirements may go down as its most destructive contemporary ruling. The VRA was the bulwark against the most flagrant forms of voter suppression. It hardly cured all evils, but those we still faced under the VRA were several orders of magnitude less grave than those now openly perpetrated against voters across the country.
Under the VRA, nine states—and a plethora of counties and municipalities—with a history of discrimination had to seek permission from the Department of Justice before changing voting laws. The pre-clearance requirement was enacted to eliminate what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg refers to as “first-generation barriers to ballot access,” like poll taxes and literacy tests. As “second-generation barriers” emerged, VRA jurisprudence evolved to address racial gerrymandering and “at-large voting,” a way for the majority to erase minority voters. Until 2013.
If Shelby County v. Holder will be one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, which she took the rare step of summarizing from the bench, will be among the most admired.
Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.
A sweeping investigation by VICE reporters Rob Arthur and Allison McCann has confirmed that the rainstorm continues. By rejecting the pre-clearance requirement formula—based on a history of race discrimination and total number of registered voters—the Supreme Court changed the landscape in 846 jurisdictions. Now, officials can change voting laws and even close polling places at will. Sometimes, the decision comes down to just one official. Often, the process is intensely political.
In the years following the Shelby decision, jurisdictions once subject to federal supervision shut down, on average, almost 20 percent more polling stations per capita than jurisdictions in the rest of the country. There are now 10 percent more people per polling place in the formerly-supervised areas than in the rest of the country.
There’s a pattern, and that’s no surprise.
Furthermore, within 18 counties in 13 states examined at a granular level, many of the closed polls were in neighborhoods with large minority populations. This analysis is the first attempt to look nationally at poll closures since the heart of the Voting Rights Act was removed.
Attacks on voting rights are more intense than ever, which makes sense. Congress had expanded the VRA’s protections as recently as 1975 in recognition of discrimination against language minorities. In 2013, there was no indication that voter suppression and discrimination was decreasing. The raft of voter suppression actions since prove it was, if anything, only in abeyance.
VICE found that legitimate externalities—early voting and vote by mail, for example—don’t account for the rates and types of changes to voting laws and polling places that have taken place since 2013.
Across the country, more than 2,000 polling places closed between the 2012 and 2016 general elections...But VICE News found that for every 10 polling places that closed in the rest of the country, 13 closed within the jurisdictions once under oversight.
That’s not even accounting for voter ID requirements, attacks on same-day and early voting, and voter purges. And while some jurisdictions and states are expanding access to voting, the former pre-clearance states aren’t doing so at the same pace. Of 26 states that have expanded access to voting since 2012, just four were formerly subject to pre-clearance.
The parade of horrors is terrifying. North Carolina is a nightmare. So is what’s happening in Georgia. Just look at Maricopa County, Arizona, or, more recently, Jefferson County, Georgia, for examples of how county-level suppression works. We need the Voting Rights Act more than ever. Times have not changed, as Chief Justice John Roberts argued in ending the pre-clearance requirements, and here’s the proof.