You Can't Change Things at the Ballot Box If You're Stripped of Your Right to Vote
It is now obvious to all but the most willfully blind that the primary obstacle to getting anything done in this country is the Republican majority in the Senate, and its leader, Mitch McConnell, currently recuperating from a broken shoulder because he has gold-standard healthcare, which soon will get him back to his job of denying healthcare to millions of his fellow citizens.
We are hearing this particularly loudly now because of the weekend's bloodletting in Ohio and Texas. No sensible gun-control legislation has been able to get past McConnell, and nor is any likely to get through him now. (I happen to think that if, somehow, the Democratic Party could achieve a veto-proof majority in the Senate, it could talk the president* into signing anything.) Lost in the gunfire, however, was yet another study from the good folks at the Brennan Center about how hard changing things through the ballot could be.
Before the Shelby County decision, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to submit proposed changes in voting procedures to the Department of Justice or a federal court for approval, a process known as “preclearance.” After analyzing the 2019 EAC data, we found:
- At least 17 million voters were purged nationwide between 2016 and 2018, similar to the number we saw between 2014 and 2016, but considerably higher than we saw between 2006 and 2008;
- The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act;
- If purge rates in the counties that were covered by Section 5 were the same as the rates in non-Section 5 counties, as many as 1.1 million fewer individuals would have been removed from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.
The numbers are staggering. Millions of purged voters obviously can swing an election or three; the study says 17 million people were purged between 2016 and 2018, and a substantial number of them were purged in counties that would have had to submit their election plans for federal pre-clearance in the years before John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee six years ago in Shelby County v. Holder.
Prior to Shelby County, jurisdictions covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act collectively had purge rates right in line with the rest of the country. A major finding in last year’s report was that jurisdictions that used to have federal oversight over their election practices began to purge more voters after they no longer had to pre-clear proposed election changes. The 2016–2018 EAC data shows a slightly wider gap in purge rates between the formerly covered jurisdictions and the rest of the country than existed between 2014 and 2016. This is of particular interest because this continued — and even widening — gap debunks possible claims that certain states would experience a one-time jump when free of federal oversight, but then return to rates in line with the rest of the country. They haven’t.
It's a long, long road back even to where we were before the Day of Jubilee, when we thought at least the forms of progress were irreversible.
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