Efforts to rig elections and limit voting among one demographic group or another have been around as long as elections have. Both of the major parties have taken a crack at it. And both have succeeded, to varying degrees. Those efforts aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, but recent court activity offers hope that they will succeed less than in eras past.
Example No. 1: The Supreme Court has declined to review a ruling from the Richmond-based 4th Circuit that struck down discriminatory voting laws in North Carolina. Granted, the nation’s high court did so because the Republican-controlled legislature and the Democratic governor split over the issue. But the decision still preserves a ruling that amounts to a warning.
Although advocates tried to portray the various requirements with regard to early voting, voter ID, and so forth as anti-fraud measures, the 4th Circuit found they were crafted to target black voters “with almost surgical precision.” (The court ruled differently with regard to Virginia’s much more carefully crafted voter-ID law.) With the Supreme Court’s action, the 4th Circuit’s ruling remains the law, and — hopefully — a deterrent. Conservatives argue that requiring voters to get something as simple as a no-cost state or federally issued ID is neither discriminatory nor onerous. Makes sense, right? Well, yes. And no. As with complicated issues involving race, politics and legislation, there’s almost always more than meets the eye. A deeper look at the matter shows that the problems with voter ID laws have less to do with what’s discriminatory or cumbersome and more to do with the varied, often subtle, cultural differences and demographic shifts of those most affected.
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Example No. 2: An appeals panel in Wisconsin h as found that the political gerrymandering of the state’s legislative district lines was so egregious as to be unconstitutional. In 2012, Wisconsin Republicans won 48.6 percent of all the votes cast in legislative races — but 60 percent of the legislative seats. The ruling relied, in part, on mathematical formulas measuring the “efficiency gap” in voting, a rough measure of the degree to which a district is competitive or not. The Supreme Court will soon consider an appeal.
Against those examples there is a counter-example: President Trump’s recent establishment of a commission to examine voter fraud, a subject on which he has complained loudly, at length, and without evidence. Which is not to say there is none: isolated cases of voter fraud do turn up across the country, but they are few. As in, literally, a few. Consider: a running database maintained by the Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank that certainly has no desire to break with the president or most other Republicans — lists only nine cases in Virginia over the past eight years. That is a far cry from the millions of illegal voters Trump claims put Hillary Clinton over the top in the popular vote.
The number of Americans who have died of rabies during that time is almost twice that number, 16. Yet we don’t see politicians of either party rushing to file bills requiring everyone to get the rabies vaccine.
But the irony — an intended one, we suspect — is that those few actual cases of votes that were cast, but should not have been, will be used to buttress the case for laws like North Carolina’s meant to keep people who have every right to vote from doing so. Which is why the courts, unfortunately, will have to sustain their eternal vigilance for years to come.
The News Virginian, with contributions from The Richmond Times-Dispatch