But those measures did actually make it easier for everyone to vote, right?
I’d imagine that a reasonable justice system could compare voting rates of minority populations to voting rates for the overall population and if the proposed law didn’t reduce the one below the other then we could consider that as evidence that the law didn’t have a disparate impact.
But don’t let me interrupt your reducto ad absurdum.
I cannot believe you think that violates the Constitution.
So, you are saying that doing something that helps and oppressed minority is morally equivalent to something that harms an oppressed minority?
It looks like it worked – Bricker agreed that the NC law violated the Voting Rights Act, he just thinks that a particular provision of the VRA is unconstitutional.
By the way, Bricker – did I convince you that the NC law violates the VRA, or did you already feel this way? If you already felt this way, why didn’t you say so (or did you say so earlier and I missed it)?
But it wasn’t “everyone.” The Democrats targeted way to make it easier for black voters to vote. They passed (“…with almost surgical precision…”) measures which made it easier for likely Democratic – black – voters to vote.
Nor would your proposal be allowed. The VRA would still be violated by the elimination of early voting. SO the early voting would be rolled back but the no-effort cards would be kept. And then later, no act of legislature could remove the cards.
No one asked, and that conclusion was not relevant to the rebuttal I was making.
I’m sure this was at least part of their intention (hopefully another part of it was the philosophical “voting should be easy for everyone” idea that I support). But in doing so they also made it easier for everyone else to vote.
I’m not sure this is how the courts would interpret it – if a bill doesn’t have a net effect of making it harder for anyone to vote, then I think they would let it be.
I did ask how you felt about the law and the ruling in a few different ways, if not this specifically. It would have saved us a lot of posts. 
If they had made it easier for black people to vote, while making it harder for white people to do the same, that would be wrong. In this case, not only did it make it easier for black people to vote, it also made it easier for white people to vote. Whether or not they took advantage of the early voting (which I’m sure at least some white people did), makes no difference, it was available if they desired it.
The ‘(“…with almost surgical precision”)’ part doesn’t fit both ways either unless the democrats did studies to find out when black people showed up at polls that were not open, wishing to vote, unlike the republicans, who saw that black people tended to vote on certain days, and eliminated those.
Making it harder for ANYONE to vote is fundamentally un-democratic.
I can’t tell if progress is being made or not.
Well, sure, but isn’t that equally true for making things easier for specific groups of people? Come, let us rationalize together!
It’s been 4 years, 202 pages, and the OP is no longer with us. Who ever said that progress was easy?
The VRA doesn’t say “net effect.”
42 U. S. C. §1973(a) forbids any “standard, practice, or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Removing early voting is a “standard, practice, or procedure.”
I disagree. If you pass a law establishing polling places in the lobby of every African-American church, to be manned every Sunday, that’s not “fundamentally democratic,” and repealing that law is not fundamentally undemocratic.
So then write it so it’s a single “standard, practice, or procedure” all wrapped up together. Give the courts a reason to not invalidate it, if it clearly adheres to the spirit of the law, and they probably won’t invalidate it.
Bricker, maybe you missed this question from earlier: wouldn’t your interpretation of the VRA’s constitutionality mean that it would be very easy for states to restrict black people’s voting by being just a little bit sneaky? Couldn’t they claim that they were getting rid of polling places in inner cities because of cost, for example?
Hypothetically, let’s say studies show that in a particular district which has Sunday voting, there is a significant Catholic population and a single large church at which a single charismatic priest encourages and energetically organizes a vote drive, and that the local Catholic population (not all of whom attends that church but whatever) tends to vote for a particular party.
Does a reasonable person have any basis for concerns if legislators of the other party end Sunday voting with that in mind? Maybe they change parking rules to disallow the street the church is on to stack up buses which until now they’ve been using for rides to the polls. There’s no stated or offered secular purpose for these changes like reducing spending or improving traffic flow - the legislators just want those changes made and dislike being asked why.
Personally, I have no problem with them voting or organizing their voting or having it be convenient for them to vote. I might object to the church keeping tax-free status if they start getting overly political.
In the purely hypothetical, of course.
That’s true.
But the state’s credibility in that explanation would rest on where the polling places were – that is, polling places removed only from inner cities would suggest that cost was a fig leaf.