I read what you wrote 3 times, and don’t understand it. If you can tease out the full statistics from that opinion piece, more power to you, but I couldn’t.
We know that 31 counties were affected, and 8 of those had 75% + black residence. The author of that piece then goes on to characterize counties by how they voted in the 2014 presidential election. If he or she wanted to present an objective analysis, he could have simply listed the percent of whites and blacks in each county affected. And then you have the complication of Hispanics, and where they fall on the color spectrum. I’m assuming Asians make up only a small percent of voters in Alabama.
Having said that, I do think it is incumbent on the Governor’s office to put out some information as to how the decision was made, and how the counties affected does no disproportionately affect minority voters. So far, I have not seen anything along those lines.
This doesn’t tell us anything about the closed satellite offices.
I don’t doubt that making voting require more bureaucratic steps will reduce turn out. However, your article (and none that I could find in a quick google search) does not actually show that blacks had a lower turnout than whites in Alabama in 2014. FWIW blacks as a group have higher voter turnout than whites in some Southern states so I wouldn’t assume this isn’t the case in Alabama. And on a long-run trend blacks actually have steadily been increasing voter turnout, the picture for whites is different. This census report actually shows that nationally black turnout passed declining white turnout through 2012.
Statewide sure, but Alabama is a deep red state. That’s to be expected. But lots of Democrats hold office in Alabama, most state offices aren’t state-wide (i.e., the entire legislature and a host of other offices.)
Let’s make it clear–a claim is being made that the government of Alabama is selectively closing offices to prevent blacks from getting voter ID. The Governor of Alabama has refuted that:
31 DMV offices are being closed, in all but 4 of the largest counties. This represents largely a defunding of DMV and will make it very annoying to get driver’s licenses in those counties.
Voter identification is available in every county from offices other than the DMV, meaning no one in those counties losing access to voter ID–they’re losing easy access to driver’s licenses.
Further claims made by others who aren’t the governor are that:
These have always been small satellite offices only open a small number of days per week (maybe one), and the four large offices have always been the source of most DMV services in Alabama, so these closures don’t represent a major change to the status quot.
These offices were often located in the same building as other government offices that can issue voter ID.
Nothing you’ve posted has established anything contrary to what the Governor has said, you’ve just repeated that Alabama is racist, voter ID sucks and etc–but there’s no actual evidence that counties with these closures will lose access to voter ID in that county. Maybe that’s the case, but no one has demonstrated it is. To be frank, unless the Governor is lying about something that a journalist can fact check in a single afternoon, I’m inclined to suspect he’s not lying. Politicians may lie a lot, but I think it takes a pretty stupid one to make a bold, unambiguous proclamation on which they know they are false and in which they can be easily fact-checked.
If things are as the Governor says they are, I don’t see that you can make a race argument. Closing 31 out of 35 DMV offices affects everyone that doesn’t live in those 4 counties, so it’s very difficult to me to make the argument of racial targeting.
Reading articles from before this made national news, back when it was just an Alabama budgetary issues, this appears to have happened:
Alabama budget is passed which provides extremely low funds for DMV offices, such that it is a factual impossibility for all of them to remain open.
The chief law enforcement officer of Alabama apparently is also responsible for the DMV, he says that they will have to close all but the 4 largest DMV offices if the budget stands as is.
Later, the Governor says he is going to see if they can find a way to keep the 31 that have to be closed open one day per month to offer driver’s license tests and etc.
What’s still vague to me is does this mean all but 4 “full” DMV offices are closing? Or does it mean “satellite offices?” Or am I just underestimating how “small town” Alabama is and Alabama only had four “full” offices in the whole state, and the rest of the State had always been serviced by low-service satellite offices, which are now going away completely?
FWIW the Alabama law enforcement chief guy seemed pretty exasperated at the evisceration of the DMV budget, so I’d guess he wasn’t on board with it. It’s unclear if the Governor was or wasn’t, and I have found no reports from the legislature explaining why they cut the budget.
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And assuming that the page you linked to is accurate, doesn’t that prove you wrong? You said all the offices being closed are in counties dominated by black populations. You put the word “all” in bold and italics. Then you linked to a page which shows that most of the offices being closed aren’t majority black.
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Do you know how many counties there are in Alabama where over 75% of the population is black? According to census data, there are two:
I’m really in awe of the Machiavellian cleverness of the Republicans. They shut down offices in 31 counties that are 75% black, when only 2 such counties exist.
Either that, or what you’re saying is total bullshit.
According to the map on your citation, eight counties have between 62-82 per cent black citizens. Only two have populations than exceed 75%, true, but several have numbers in the 70’s. Your use of this citation is more evasive than informative. It is a correction masquerading as a refutation.
This news article points out that driver’s licenses are the big worry, not voter ID. Alabama officials admit that it’s gotten much harder for poor Alabamans to get their first driver’s license.
As for the free voter ID, one complaint is that the registration process is made intimidating. Petitioner must swear, risking Class C Felony Perjury, that he/she has no other ID, according to the NAACP.
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Nitpick: With “generation” typically considered 25 years or more, why did the racism deniers in the thread decide that “50 years ago” is “three generations ago.” Do I now I have a great-grandchild who’s a teenager? No; we’d have to be breeding in early puberty to achieve that. In fact, I was still a virgin in 1965.
Actually, I was just about to post a correction and an update. I was incorrectly assuming that a large number of counties had such majorities and that the second statement about “every one with > 75% registered black voters had their DMV closed” was a much larger number than the “8 out of 10 of the counties with the largest number of registered black voters had their DMV closed”. In fact the latter is the larger number. I was wrong and apologize for the mistake, and I also think the article’s statement was misleading unless “> 75% of registered voters being black” means something drastically different from “> 75% of the population is black”. And 75% of county registered voters being black is a bad threshold to use if you want to make a point about the number of blacks potentially being disenfranchised.
That said, let’s see why the point still stands. First of all according to this US Census page, there were, as of the latest census, three such counties, not two, but more to the point, the census bureau shades in black those which have significant black majorities of more than about 68%: Sumter Greene Perry Dallas Wilcox Lowndes Macon Bullock. At least a further three have lesser black majorities: Marengo Hale Montgomery. That’s 11 in total that have actual black majorities All in Alabama’s black belt.
According to the article below, between 12 and 15 of the counties in the black belt are getting their DMVs shut down, depending on how you define that geography. And according to Rachel Maddow’s map from the previous link, there are only about 17 counties in the typical definition of that region. Those are the sorts of proportions we’re talking about.
Compare that with this list:
Look at the list of counties now where you can’t get a driver’s license. There’s Choctaw, Sumter, Hale, Greene, Perry, Wilcox, Lowndes, Butler, Crenshaw, Macon, Bullock …
If you had to memorize all the Alabama Counties in 9th grade, like I did – and even if you forgot most of them, like I have – you can probably guess where we’re going with this.
Depending on which counties you count as being in Alabama’s Black Belt, either twelve or fifteen Black Belt counties soon won’t have a place to get a driver’s license.
I myself make no such assumption. If some of these folks engaged in vote suppression are racist, that’s immaterial. I’m sure they would have their minions personally chauffeur the black people to the polls in their limos if they knew they were going to vote for them. But since they know most of them are not, they’ve been engaged for the better part of a century in making sure that they don’t vote at all.
It’s funny how 50 years ago is ancient history when we’re talking about the civil rights movement. But my oldest sibling–a quintessential Gen Xer–is coming up on 50. Plenty of people who were voting back in those “bad ole days” are still voting today.
I’ll try and rephrase it then : we know that all 75%+ black counties got hit - 100%. You were saying we don’t know how many of the remainder was majorly white.
My point is that it hardly matters : we know that not all counties were hit, and we know ALL the majority black districts were. Since it’s not possible for all majority white districts to have closed, then perforce the percentage of majority white counties hit mathematically cannot be higher than that of blacks.
It’s possible that it’s a mere coincidence, but it warrants looking into.
(the Latino angle is, I think, a red herring - Alabama ranks 40 among US States there, with only ~4% of the population being Latinos)
Pretty much, yeah.
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Your use of this citation is more evasive than informative. It is a correction masquerading as a refutation.
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Oh hi, you must be new here :). I take it you’ve met ITR Champion. He does that. Got more spin in him than a Jesuit working for Fox News and more misdirection than a prestidigitators’ convention, he does.
As you can see, that statistic about 75% + black counties is suspect as there are not 8, but 2 or 3. And you are confusing all counties containing 75% + blacks with all counties containing majority black residence. So, no, we don’t know that “all majority black districts were” hit.
Also let’s remember the article in the National Review, which is clearly written by an activist with his own agenda(I’d have the same reaction to something similar in say Think Progress) says “typically” they were in the very same building, but doesn’t give any hard answers as to what he meant by typically. Was that 10 of the 31 offices, 17, 25, 8?
We don’t know and I’m a bit reminded of how when I worked in sales whenever asked what our prices were compared to our competitors the answer we always gave was “competitive”.
Typical HC-say anything to make a story.
Remember, she was for the Pacific Trade Agreement before she was against it. The thing to remember about the Clintons; nothing they said 30 seconds ago means anything-what is relevant is what they are saying now.
it’s like “depends upon what the definition of “is” is”.
Do you think there is a problem with citing ThinkProgress? Do you think there should not be a problem with citing National Review? Why? Make your case.
If you think I’ve never admonished folks from citing Think Progress, you haven’t been here very long. The problem is not so much with either NR or TP as long as they, themselves, link to the original source material. My experience is that they often don’t, and when they do, they often “spin” the information from the original source to more closely align with the point of view they are advocating.
