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SHELBY COUNTY OPENED THE DOOR TO MODERN-DAY POLL TAXES  
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Michael Podhorzer
March 21, 2024
Weekend Reading
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_ Voter suppression is the modern-day version of poll taxes. The idea
that there is an “acceptable” level of voter suppression is
antithetical to what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy with
equal voting rights for all. _

,

 

We are just a few weeks past the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,”
when civil rights activists, including John Lewis, were brutally
beaten upon attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma,
Alabama to begin their march to Montgomery for voting rights. We think
of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) just five months
later as a shining moment in American history, when it appeared that
America might be ready to finally make good on the “promissory
note”
[[link removed]] King
had spoken of two years earlier. 

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Yet somehow, 59 years later, we have accepted and moved on from the
Supreme Court gutting the VRA in its 2013_ Shelby County
[[link removed]]_ ruling
[[link removed]]. Worse, many believe political
science has “proven” that voter suppression laws enacted
since _Shelby_ have not actually suppressed the vote.1
[[link removed]] Recently,
however, the Brennan Center released a groundbreaking report,
“Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008–2022
[[link removed]],”
which concluded the opposite – that the racial turnout gap2
[[link removed]] “is
increasing nationwide, especially in counties that had been subject to
federal oversight until the Supreme Court invalidated preclearance in
2013.” (It was written up in the New York Times here
[[link removed]].) 

The Brennan Center study is a work of extraordinary and vital
scholarship, based on substantially more data over a longer period of
time than other studies that appear to show little or no impact on
turnout from voter suppression measures. Rather than trying to assess
the impact of specific voter suppression policies in isolation, it
shows the cumulative harm that resulted once states and counties were
free to change their voting rules without proving that those changes
would have no discriminatory effects.

In this post, I will offer original analysis that not only
corroborates Brennan's findings, but also illustrates a key dimension
of how voter suppression works in the real world – a sort of
generational replacement, where older and established voters keep up
their voting habits, while new restrictions stymie younger voters.
(For convenience, “younger” voters are Millennials and Gen Z and
“older” voters are Boomers, Greatest, and Silent Generations.) I
will also explain how reducing turnout among certain groups is not the
only effect of voter suppression. Restrictive voting laws also make
it _more costly _to vote, both for individuals and for civil
society. 

I have been reluctant to post on this topic because the minute we
debate how _much_ impact the stricter voter rules have had, we allow
that _any_ impact is tolerable. However, it’s important to point
out that even on its own terms, the argument that voter restrictions
do not meaningfully reduce Black turnout is simply incorrect. My
analysis and Brennan’s both show clear impacts on turnout for voters
of color.3
[[link removed]] But,
again: _IT SHOULD NOT MATTER WHETHER VOTING RESTRICTIONS RESULT IN
RELATIVELY FEWER BLACK PEOPLE VOTING IF THEY DISPROPORTIONATELY MAKE
IT MORE BURDENSOME FOR THEM TO VOTE, EITHER FINANCIALLY OR IN TIME
SPENT. THAT’S JUST A POLL TAX BY ANOTHER NAME. PERIOD_.

Asking “how much impact” is also troublesome because in every
other instance when we are asked to accept compromises to our
individual liberties, it is for the sake of a higher public purpose.
But in this case, the “higher public purpose” (“election
integrity”) is the wholly unsubstantiated invention of the
Republicans and MAGA activists who themselves are the greatest threat
to election integrity. Their argument is, “The only way to restore
(white) voter confidence in the integrity of election results (which
they had before our lies destroyed it) is to enact additional
‘safeguards’ (making it more difficult for voters favoring
Democrats to vote and have their ballots counted.)”

HOW VOTER SUPPRESSION ACTUALLY WORKS

On first blush, you might expect voting restrictions to start
suppressing Black voters immediately. But let’s take a step back. In
reality, those who had been regular voters before the restrictions
were enacted are the least likely to be affected by suppressive
efforts. At that point, those voters were habitual voters. Even if it
took a little longer to vote or was a little more inconvenient in the
next election, you wouldn’t expect a big change in behavior. On top
of that, in 2012 (the last election before _Shelby_), nearly half of
African American voters were Boomers or older – the generations that
either won the right to vote, or were old enough to remember it
happening. So, unsurprisingly, most have continued to vote reliably;
at a minimum it was a personal habit, one that was reinforced by
social expectations. (This is well documented in _Steadfast
Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior.)
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Furthermore, as empirical work
[[link removed]] by André Blais and
Christopher H. Achen shows, the electorate consists of two types of
voters – those who have a sense of “civic duty” and will likely
vote regardless of what’s at stake in any particular election, and
those whose turnout depends on the stakes as well as perceptions of
aggregate turnout. The analysis by Blais and Achen convincingly shows
that a “turnout model misses something fundamental if it does not
take into account the effect of civic duty.”  

With that in mind, I am going to illustrate what actually happened
using the Catalist voter files from the 2012 election and the 2020
election. I’m going to define four categories, from jurisdictions
most likely to least likely to be suppressing Black votes: 

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States covered by the Voting Rights Act4
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*
States that were not covered by the Voting Rights Act, but where
Republican trifectas have been restricting voting rights.5
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Counties covered by the Voting Rights Act but not in covered states.6
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*
All other states

Common sense would tell you that voter suppression has its greatest
impact on those for whom voting has not been established as a habit,
and on those whose social groups feel less of a “civic duty” to
vote. Thus, you would expect that voter suppression tactics would have
the greatest impact on younger generations. You would also expect that
the depression in Black voting would be greatest for the youngest
generations and would be more pronounced in counties in which voter
suppression was practiced after 2012. 

_AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN 2012 AND 2020, AS
MILLENNIAL AND GEN Z VOTERS MADE UP AN INCREASING SHARE OF THE BLACK
ELIGIBLE POPULATION. _(By 2020, Boomers, Silent and Greatest
Generation voters were only a third of the Black electorate. For Gen
X, turnout rates and changes in the racial turnout gap consistently
fall in between those of younger and older voters.)  

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As you can see, Black Gen Z/Millennial voters were far more impacted
in the three more suppressive categories than elsewhere. There was
also virtually no change in the racial turnout gap for older voters
outside the suppressive jurisdictions. Furthermore, more restrictive
jurisdictions had a wider gulf in participation between older and
younger Black voters.7
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WHAT MATTERS: THE COST OF VOTING

The evidence is unambiguous that Republican voting restrictions have
made it more costly to vote – in money, time, or both –
since _Shelby_. For example, getting the “right” ID costs both
time and money, and numerous studies
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that people of color are significantly less likely to have the kind of
identification mandated by most voter ID laws. Longer lines or fewer
options for voting certainly cost time, which is also money for hourly
workers taking time off. And so on. Many studies try to assess the
impact of _particular_ voter suppression policies rather than
evaluate the cumulative harm from the entire regime of voter
suppression. Such an approach also ignores what is unwritten in the
policy specifics – the intentions of local election administrators,
which, of course, are highly correlated with the intentions of the
formal changes.

Scholars have tracked the “cost of voting
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since the 1990’s by scoring each state based on metrics such as
average wait time at a polling place or whether the state allows early
voting. As you can see in the graph below, the “cost” of voting
dramatically increased between 2012 and 2020 in the states that were
originally covered by the VRA (whether it was the entire state or only
certain counties) and in those states with Republican trifectas, while
dramatically decreasing elsewhere.8
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The very recently published _The Cost of Voting in the American
States_, by Michael J. Pomante II, Scot Schraufnagel, and Quan
Li,_ _is an exhaustive, rigorous exploration of the cost of voting
going back decades.9
[[link removed]] It
is worth quoting their conclusions, which found that Obama’s
election triggered Republicans to push more restrictive voting rules,
and that the trend worsened after _Shelby_:

Our results uncover evidence in support of the “racial threat”
theory. … Moreover, we know that Republican-leaning states became
more restrictive after the country elected Barack Obama, the first
Black president. Before the 2008 election, there was a negative link
between COVI values and a larger percentage of GOP members in each
state’s legislature. Put differently, in the earlier period, the
GOP, on average, was associated with a less restrictive electioneering
posture. The bivariate and the statistically significant relationship
between the GOP and election restrictions does not materialize until
after Obama’s electoral success. 

Moreover, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling in _Shelby
County v. Holder_, and in time for the 2016 election cycle, we witness
the relationship between GOP control and a more restrictive climate
grow even stronger. The 2016 election cycle was the first to allow
states with a history of racist policies to change their laws without
preclearance or oversight from the federal government. Yet, before the
landmark 5–4 Supreme Court decision, we found evidence that the
Republican Party was associated with more costly voting in states with
larger Black populations and growing Hispanic populations.10
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Again, these irrefutable increases in the cost of voting constitute a
poll tax, and as such should be the beginning and the end of the
answer to whether the voter restrictions enacted over the last dozen
years are legitimate. 

VOTER SUPPRESSION = DEMOCRACY SUPPRESSION

As bad as it is to assess voter suppression only in terms of whether
it’s effectively reducing Black turnout, insult is added to injury
when such arguments ignore the other ways in which voter suppression
undermines democratic elections. In this section, I’ll name a few. 

A POLL TAX ON CIVIL SOCIETY 

Voting rights groups will have to spend more resources on making sure
affected voters can cast a ballot. Nonpartisan organizations seeking
to close the racial voting gap, and Democratic campaigns attempting to
do the same, easily spend in excess of $100 million per cycle to
register and turn out voters of color beyond what it would cost if all
voters had equal access to register and vote. 

EXPLOITING RACIAL DIVISIONS 

Voter suppression proponents spread the fiction that their laws are
necessary because voter fraud is rampant – specifically, voter fraud
by people of color. People of color are either named explicitly (as
with false claims that undocumented Latino immigrants are illegally
voting en masse), or in thinly veiled euphemisms like “Democrat
cities.
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These fictions impugn people of color as being untrustworthy at best,
and outright evil and deceptive at worst. They feed and fuel lies
about Black, young, Native, and new Americans that quite
literally land them
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mistakes
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meanwhile, white people who commit actual documented voting crimes
get slapped on the wrist
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Consider how all of this might affect voters in the targeted
communities. Not only do they see themselves targeted; they might lose
confidence in the legitimacy of the whole process when the slanders
against them both become the warrant for making it more difficult for
them to vote, and are insufficiently resisted by others despite being
executed in so blatantly undemocratic a fashion.

Moreover, when Republican legislatures enact voting restrictions, they
create a no-win choice for Democrats. By advantaging white voters in a
blatantly anti-democratic way, Republicans make it seem to white
voters that Democrats are playing the “race card” if they object.
But if Democrats don’t object, they will rightly appear to be
unconcerned with the rights of Black voters. To the extent Democratic
candidates are rallying Black support, they are often seen as ignoring
other “more important” issues like jobs or inflation. This is
especially problematic for Black Democratic candidates running
statewide. And, as mentioned above, voter restrictions impose
unnecessary extra costs on Democratic campaigns seeking to turn out
people of color.  

UNDERMINING FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS

Campaigns to restrict voting poison confidence in election outcomes by
manufacturing and amplifying lies about voter fraud. Indeed, this has
become so acute that essentially a third of the population (MAGA
Republicans) now routinely disbelieves election results when their
candidate loses.  

The “voter fraud” fiction has been deliberately created for the
purpose of helping Republicans win. Consider this sampling of saying
the quiet part out loud: 

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In 1980, Paul Weyrich, Moral Majority leader and co-founder of the
Heritage Foundation, warned a crowd of “conservative Christians”
about the problem of “wanting everyone to vote.” Weyrich said:
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everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they
never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not
now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly
goes up as the voting populace goes down." 

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In November 2012 Jim Greer, the former chair of the Republican Party
in Florida, told the press
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the goal of the passage of restrictions on early/absentee voting and
voter registration was to make voting more difficult and inconvenient.
He expounded that more convenient voting “is bad for Republican
Party candidates.” 

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In 2013 Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai boasted
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the state’s new voter identification law intended to “allow
Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” 

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In April 2016 Wisconsin State Representative Glenn Grothman bragged
that 2016 would be different from previous elections because “now we
have photo I.D., and I think photo I.D. is gonna make a little bit of
a difference.”

In no case are state voter restrictions enacted with bipartisan
majorities, and in nearly all cases they are enacted without a single
Democratic vote. This makes equal voting rights seem like a partisan
issue, when in fact they are the prerequisite for a functioning
democracy. 

CONCLUSION

Some analysts presuppose that for voter suppression to “matter,”
the effect must be sufficiently large to swing an election. But the
idea that there is an “acceptable” level of voter suppression is
antithetical to what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy with
equal voting rights for all. For many who make these arguments, the
threat to democracy is not voting restrictions, but those who complain
about them; white voters’ (fabricated) anxieties about voter fraud
seem to matter more than the very real threats to Black voters’
equal democratic participation. 

Since Obama’s election, Republicans have fairly succeeded in
returning the South to a one-party region
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reversing progress on civil and human rights. Voting restrictions have
been one element of that program. In that context, it’s even more
bizarre to question one element of their comprehensive program in
isolation.

Somehow, we’ve gone from condemning legislation with discriminatory
effects on the _cost of voting_ regardless of its stated intent, to
minimizing the import of legislation enacted with discriminatory
intent because it doesn’t seem to have a significant impact on
partisan outcomes. 

The purpose of elections is to establish the consent of the governed.
Restricting voting in any way that has foreseeable (let alone
intended) disproportionate consequences is by definition
anti-democratic. There is but one side to this question. 

1
[[link removed]] Some
examples of this type of coverage: The New Voting Restrictions
Aren’t as Restrictive as Many Think - POLITICO
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silver lining of voter ID laws: they aren’t effective at suppressing
the vote - Vox
[[link removed]]; Opinion
| This Is One Republican Strategy That Isn’t Paying Off - The New
York Times
[[link removed]]; Georgia’s
Election Law, and Why Turnout Isn’t Easy to Turn Off - The New York
Times
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racial turnout gap is defined as the turnout rate for white voters
minus either the turnout rate for African American, Latino, AAPI, or
all “non-white” voters collectively. 

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[[link removed]] In
this post my focus is voter suppression of Black voters. My argument
holds for any group targeted for voter suppression, but because my
purpose is to show why we should not be debating the impact of voter
suppression on turnout at all, cycling through the same analysis for
other groups would be counterproductive. That said, for the reasons I
lay out the Latino turnout gap is much larger than the Black turnout
gap because younger voters comprise an even greater share of Latino
voters than Black voters. Unlike Latino and African Americans, two
thirds of the AAPI population reside in states that were never covered
by the Voting Rights Act.  

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[[link removed]] The
states covered in entirety by section 5 of the VRA were Alabama,
Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina,
Texas, and Virginia. 

5
[[link removed]] States
that were not covered under section 5, but that had a Republican
trifecta post-Shelby and passed voting restrictions are: Arkansas,
Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North
Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

6
[[link removed]] A
number of counties outside the South were covered. Many of them have
been rehabilitated by progress in their states. As a group average,
they are likely to be less restrictive than the first two categories.

7
[[link removed]] There
was already a generation gap in the racial turnout gap in 2012, as the
oldest generation of Black voters, who had won the right to vote in
their lifetime, were actually voting at a higher rate than white
voters of the same age. 

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[[link removed]] I
combine the three categories for clarity. 

9
[[link removed]] Pomante,
Michael J.; Schraufnagel, Scot; Li, Quan. The Cost of Voting in the
American States (Studies in Government and Public Policy) (pp.
140-141). University Press of Kansas. Kindle Edition. 

10
[[link removed]] Pomante,
Michael J.; Schraufnagel, Scot; Li, Quan. The Cost of Voting in the
American States (Studies in Government and Public Policy) (p. 117).
University Press of Kansas. Kindle Edition.

Michael Podhorzer @michaelpodhorzer1 is former political director of
the AFL-CIO. Senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Founder: Analyst Institute, Research Collaborative (RC), Co-founder:
Working America, Catalist. He publishes Weekend Reading.
(weekendreading.net [[link removed]])

* voter suppression
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* poll tax
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* Shelby County v. Holder
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* elections
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