A new study offers compelling evidence that voter suppression is devastatingly effective.

([link removed])

The racial turnout gap — the difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color — nearly closed in 2008. This was part of a 40-year trend that began with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, including the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The closing gap was an encouraging measure of progress.

Unfortunately, this progress is now reversing. A landmark Brennan Center

([link removed])

report released last week shows that, for the last decade, the racial turnout gap has been widening.

Many factors contribute to voter participation, but the data shows that a 2013 Supreme Court decision has played a major role in exacerbating the racial turnout gap.

In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court suspended a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their voting rules. It was perhaps the nation’s most important check on voter suppression.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorably summarized the absurdity of Shelby County’s logic this way: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Several states, freed from federal review by Shelby County, have passed dozens of new laws making it harder to vote. That trend is ongoing: last year alone, at least 14 states passed

([link removed])

17 restrictive voting laws.

Shelby County and the resulting restrictive voting laws set the stage for a national experiment on voter suppression. My colleagues Kevin Morris, senior research fellow and voting policy scholar, and Coryn Grange, research associate in voting rights, compiled nearly 1 billion vote records across 14 years. We believe it’s the most comprehensive set of such data ever collected.

The data shows that the racial turnout gap is growing almost twice as quickly in regions that used to be covered by Section 5 than in the rest of the country. This accelerated reversal helps quantify the effect of losing Section 5 on voters of color, as well as the link between the voter suppression laws made possible by Shelby County and depressed turnout in these communities.

In the 2022 elections, the white-Black turnout gap in formerly covered regions was 5 percentage points higher than it would have been had the Voting Rights Act remained in effect. This is the Shelby County effect — hundreds of thousands of voters of color now sit out elections in places where voter suppression has flourished.

The effect remains present even when taking account of the traditional drivers of voter participation. We controlled for income and education, for example, and the turnout gap remains. This study is strong evidence that voter suppression carries real consequences for voters of color.

Public response to the Brennan Center’s findings has been encouraging. The New York Times featured the report in its Sunday print edition, and many other national outlets covered the study and quoted experts who vouched for its integrity.

Now we will dig further into the reasons for this widening turnout gap. Two dozen social scientists will present papers next week at a conference at NYU School of Law, “The Racial Turnout Gap in the 21st Century.” They will explore the full array of factors at work — voting laws, social trends, political alienation, party mobilization, and more.

I hope you’ll read the report. In recent years, the “but actually” crowd has claimed that voter suppression isn’t a real problem. We believe this new data — to repeat, 1 billion vote records — should be the final word in this debate.


Officeholder Abuse Hurts Representative Democracy

As documented in a recent Brennan Center report

([link removed])

based on nationwide polling, local elected officials and state legislators across the country are facing a torrent of abuse. But these burdens are unequal, with women, people of color, and young people experiencing outsize effects of hostility on their personal and public lives. As Grady Yuthok Short and Maya Kornberg explain in a new analysis, the disparities in officeholder abuse are interfering with representative democracy. “Intimidation makes it harder for these groups to run for and remain in office, therefore hampering their ability to create policy change on behalf of underrepresented communities,” they write. Read more

([link removed])

The Political Clash Jeopardizing Public Safety

An elected prosecutor in Arizona has refused a request to extradite a man who stands accused of murder in New York City, citing disagreements with the city’s criminal justice policies. This extraordinary step, which flies in the face of law enforcement norms, was taken for political reasons and is based on bad information. “For the sake of public safety and the rule of law, she should reverse course immediately,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Ames Grawert, and Rosemary Nidiry write in the Arizona Republic. Read more

([link removed])

Tech Giants Must Be Held Accountable

Twenty of the world’s leading tech companies signed an agreement last month aimed at combating the deceptive use of artificial intelligence in elections. The pledges include encouraging commitments to flag and remove deepfake content when needed, but they are entirely unenforceable and contain significant omissions. “At this point, the democracies of the world who may pay the biggest price need more than promises. We need accountability,” Lawrence Norden and David Evan Harris write. Read more

([link removed])

Keeping Tabs on State High Courts

State supreme courts issue hundreds of decisions each year affecting voting rights, reproductive freedom, and other important rights. But information about these cases is often difficult to access. The user-friendly database created by State Court Report

([link removed])

makes it simpler to find hundreds of key state constitutional decisions issued since January 2021, along with supporting materials. A new primer by State Court Report’s Nancy Watzman and Douglas Keith explains how to use this resource to explore specific cases in detail and track trends across states. Read more

([link removed])

News

Elizabeth Goitein on the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve its surveillance power // NEW YORK TIMES

([link removed])

Douglas Keith on state supreme court elections // ASSOCIATED PRESS

([link removed])

Gowri Ramachandran on abuse of officeholders // FAST COMPANY

([link removed])

Michael Waldman on the Supreme Court’s decision to take up Trump’s immunity claim // WASHINGTON POST

([link removed])

Feedback on this newsletter? Email us at [email protected]


([link removed])

Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law

120 Broadway, Suite 1750 New York, NY 10271

646-292-8310

tel:646-292-8310

[email protected]

Support Brennan Center

([link removed]

Want to change how you receive these emails or unsubscribe? Click here

[link removed]

to update your preferences.

([link removed])

([link removed])

([link removed])

([link removed])

([link removed])

([link removed])