I was surprised there wasn’t a thread about this. I usually see Bricker start threads about these kinds of decisions
An NPR story summarizes the rulings in Kansas, Texas, North Dakota, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
As the story mentions, it is not coincidence that so many of these cases were before the courts:
The North Carolina decision was fairly damning with the court saying the new voting regulations were clearly designed to be discriminatory.
So how will this affect the election? The Texas ruling apparently just punted the case back to the lower court until after November. I believe that only North Carolina and Wisconsin are the real “swing states” among the group.
In terms of the effect on the election, it’s obviously good for Democrats that more qualified voters can do so. It’s also good for Democrats to have the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stating that the North Carolina legislature was trying to illegally suppress the black vote, because that kind of thing motivates black voters to get to the polls and punish them. Quite appropriately!
To be fair to Bricker, a lot of these decisions were not about voter ID, or only partly about voter ID. The biggest issues were things like rolling back early voting in a way precisely designed to suppress black voters.
Not a new thread, but the North Carolina decision is being discussed extensively (with significant contributions from Bricker) in the ongoing thread I Pit the ID-demanding GOP vote-suppressors starting at post #9694.
Well that’s what gave them the opening but it doesn’t explain the audacity of publicly researching racial voting patterns then enacting legislation targeted at African Americans.
But since this is in Elections, I am more interested in how this will actually affect things rather than go on about how evil voter id laws are. As Richard Parker said above, some of the findings of the court could be galvanizing. Clinton is holding a decent lead already in NC, this could make it a lock. I’m unsure how many actual more votes these rulings will make possible i.e. will there be a perceptible rise in voting numbers.
I think the recent SCOTUS rulings when Scalia was alive emboldened the racists. These things were probably set in motion before Scalia died and they thought they could get away with them. Once Clinton gets someone on the SCOTUS, we’ll see much more insidious laws that are not so blatant.
Fivethirtyeight discusses the effects on the election. My takeaway is this:
The research doesn’t look specifically at nonwhite vs. white, or Democratic vs. Republican, turnout. However, my understanding from other research, including that performed by NC Republicans, is that the depression in turnout will disproportionately affect nonwhite Democratic voters. In close elections, the success of such laws may result in a Republican victory; having such laws blocked may allow enough people to vote that the existing Democratic majority can actually win the election.
North Carolina got hit hard because they so obviously meant to hit African American voters. And then somewhere (was it John Oliver?) some guy tried to defend it saying they weren’t targeting African Americans, just Democrats.
Ha ha. But you can see the distinction. “Hey, I am a partisan asshole not a racist asshole! If black people voted for Republicans I’d have no problem with them!”
Just wanted to correct myself here: The Houston Chronicle is reporting today that an agreement has been reached to greatly expand what ID is valid in Texas along with a bunch of other concession. If it’s approved by the federal judge it will be in place for the November election.
The original plan, as hammered out by the Gnomes of ALEC, was more modest in its goals: simply trim away about one or two percentage points from the overall Dem turnout. That, coupled with exquisitely precise gerrymandering, would give an overall Republican advantage, they would win more of the close elections than they would lose.
This was the plan of sane and careful cynicism. But somewhere along the line, the batshit baboon brigade took control and wanted to run the table. Why win when you can crush?
The Republican’s America is the real America, America is a conservative country, America is a center right country, and everybody knows it. You don’t have to prove it because everybody knows it. Therefore it follows that the only way Dems could have been winning anything was voter fraud. A plausible scenario for a mind that simply refuses fact.
We have it on the very best authority that “some” Republicans had malign motives in all of this. But it seems likely to me that others simply believed that they were undoing a great wrong that had been inflicted upon them, they were setting things right. Because the Dem voting fraud was so massive and pervasive, this simple expedient would crush their nefarious scheme. A small but consistent advantage? Ha! They would crush!
But the best laid plans of moose and men aft gang unglued!
If Trump wins and if the GOP keeps congress, the first item of business (besides the deportation of illegals) will be loading the courts with right wing ideological warriors, not Ivy League grads but alumni from some online for-profit college (Trump U, maybe?). The damage to the judiciary would not be reversed in our lifetime, and maybe not even in our children’s lifetime. Seriously, folks, any left-leaning voter who is so blindly angry at Hillary that they can’t see the danger here is just voting against their own interests.
