The Voter Suppression Chronicles When the Roberts Court all but nullified the Voting Rights Act, it said the pre-1965 practices were long gone. New hearings by the House make clear: They’re back. BY BO B M O S E R
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ristin Scott had a mess on her hands. In June of last year, less than three months before the start of early voting for the midterms, the news had come down to the elections director of rural Halifax County, North Carolina: The state’s Republican lawmakers, those mad scientists of American voter suppression, had voted to create uniform hours for early voting across the state. Every polling place would have to be open Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The bill had seemingly popped up out of nowhere, tacked on to a budget bill the day before and waved through in just 40 hours with no public testimony, committee hearings, or input from local or state elections officials. “In the most undemocratic way possible, we’re undermining democracy,” fumed Democratic state Senator Jay Chaudhuri. Scott’s reaction was more pragmatic: “Uhoh. What do we do now?” Like other counties, Halifax had always been free to set its own hours for early voting, based on when folks were likeliest to show up. In recent years, it had three sites open from 8:30 to 5. That meant one shift per poll worker, which helped to keep costs down. And that mattered in Halifax, a vast stretch of northeastern North Carolina pine hills with a 53 percent African American population—and not a place that could easily handle what ProPublica accurately deemed an “unfunded mandate,” since the legislature had authorized no funds to help counties expand their hours. “We’re ranked as one of the poorest counties in the state,” Scott says, “and our commissioners had just allotted us a little over $160,000 to purchase new voting machines.”
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(The old models had been melting down on Election Days.) “And then you’re talking about going back to request more money they hadn’t budgeted for?” She laughs. “Right.” Scott and her two-member staff, their plans for the fall suddenly scuttled, scrambled to figure out a solution. The new edict meant that the costs of keeping open Halifax’s three early-voting sites would multiply; poll workers would have to be found for two shifts per day, and “we already had trouble recruiting enough of them,” Scott says. But if they eliminated one or two of the early polling places, it would create a real hardship for many voters: Halifax’s population is little more than 50,000, but it’s spread out across an area that’s larger than Houston, Texas. One in eight households have no cars, and there’s no public transportation. “Now, no matter where we located the one site,” Scott says, “some people were going to have to go upwards of 20 miles to get there.” But the budget was what it was. Even though most of its eligible residents tended to vote early, Halifax would have only one place for them to go—a long way to go, for many. When Scott announced the decision, she braced for what she knew would come next. “People called from the time we opened till we closed, every day,” Scott recalls. “They felt slighted. They thought we were trying to keep people from voting, and they accused us of trying to ‘rig’ the election by taking away citizens’ right to vote. People found my personal number. It got ugly.” She understood the frustration and fury. Halifax voters had been hit hard, repeatedly, by North Carolina’s flurry of voter-suppression laws following the Supreme Court’s Shelby
v. Holder decision in 2013. In a 5-4 vote, the Court’s conservatives struck down the Voting Rights Act’s key provision, which had required states and locales like North Carolina—places with histories of racial discrimination in voting—to seek approval from the Department of Justice before making any changes to voting. From the moment Barack Obama carried North Carolina in 2008 with a massive surge of black and young voters, Republicans had been champing at the bit to overturn the state’s progressive voting laws. They’d done careful research, as The Washington Post later reported, diving into statistics showing what kinds of “reform” would reduce turnout from black, Latino, and young voters the most. With Shelby, they had their chance. Less than two months after the decision, they passed what became known as the “monster” voting law, mandating voter IDs that hundreds of thousands of black North Carolinians lacked, eliminating same-day registration at the polls (used predominantly by black and student voters), and ordering counties to throw out provisional “out-of-precinct” ballots (used disproportionately by low-income folks who move often). The new law also eliminated “pre-registration” for 16- and 17-year-olds at their high schools, which had sent young voters’ turnout soaring, and outlawed “souls to the polls” Sunday voting prior to elections, which had become a tradition for black churches. And all this was on top of one of the nation’s most extreme gerrymanders of state and congressional districts, passed in 2011 by the first majority- GOP legislature in North Carolina since Reconstruction. Ever since, Scott says, “it’s been nothing but