Accessible Elections by Michael Ritter;Caroline J. Tolbert;

Author:Michael Ritter;Caroline J. Tolbert; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2020-01-14T21:00:00+00:00

What We Know About Race and State Election Laws

Stacy Abrams is not alone in arguing that race and ethnicity are still firmly connected to state voting laws. Academic research on this topic is extensive. A large part of the history of voting in the U.S. is connected to race (V.O. Key’s Southern Politics [1949]). Before the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868, no federal guarantee of a right to vote existed for individuals regardless of race or ethnicity. Even so, with some brief advances in African American electoral success in the late 1860s and the 1870s during Reconstruction (Berman 2015; Keyssar 2009), the protected right to vote would not be established again until the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965—and its extensions in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006. The eleven former Confederate states have been shown to have lower levels of political participation than the rest of the country (Key 1949; Kim, Petrocik, and Enokson 1975; Rosenstone and Hansen 2002).

Springer (2014) documents the long arc of political participation over the past century, showing that the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws (poll taxes and literacy tests) significantly reduced turnout in the Southern states. Keyssar (2009) notes that periods of expansion in voting rights have been followed by periods of restriction, as when the Jim Crow period followed Reconstruction. Some argue that a similar pattern has occurred today, particularly since the Supreme Court decided in Crawford v. Marion County (2008) that voter ID laws were constitutional even in the absence of voter fraud evidence; and in Holder v. Shelby County (2013), in which the Supreme Court decided that the VRA no longer mandated that states with histories of discriminatory voting systems get preclearance from the federal Department of Justice before changing their voting laws (Lopez 2014; Rhodes 2017). Since these decisions, the number of states with restrictive identification laws has increased to thirty-five (National Conference of State Legislatures 2018), and a non-trivial number of states including North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin have made early voting, same day registration, and absentee voting more restrictive (Hasen 2014; Herron and Smith 2012).

Other restrictive state voting laws include racial gerrymanders, racially discriminatory voter purges, barriers to provisional voting, felon disenfranchisement, and other structural changes to a state’s voting system that seems uniquely designed to disadvantage racial and ethnic minorities (Anderson 2018; Berman 2015; Curtist 2016; Weiser 2014). Even with the expansion of voting rights and the increase in the number of states with convenience voting laws since the 1980s (Larocca and Klemanski 2011), these more recent changes in state voting laws threaten the suffrage rights of racial and ethnic minorities. Other studies have focused on how felony disenfranchisement laws affect voter participation (Manza and Uggen 2006).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.