Standing Up For the Right to Vote
By What Linda Greenhouse says:
Progressives who are frustrated by President Obama’s failure to close the prison at Guantánamo, or who are seething over the administration’s surrender to the religious right on the question of emergency contraception for teen-aged girls, have something to cheer in the resurrection of the Justice Department’s previously moribund Civil Rights Division. The decision late last month by Thomas E. Perez, the division’s head, to block South Carolina’s new voter identification law is important both symbolically and practically. It has been underestimated so far in both dimensions.
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Fast forward to December 23, 2011, when Assistant Attorney General Perez invoked the Voting Rights Act to block South Carolina’s new voter ID law from taking effect. As a state with a history of obstructing efforts by its black citizens to exercise their right to vote, South Carolina is covered by the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, which requires the state to receive the approval of the Justice Department or the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. before making a change to any voting procedure. For a “covered” jurisdiction to receive the necessary “preclearance” under Section 5, it has to show that its proposed change has neither the purpose nor the likely effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or language ability.
South Carolina had not met its burden of proof, Mr. Perez told the state, adding pointedly that “the state’s submission did not include any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud” that justified the change. As is typical, South Carolina’s new law requires either a driver’s license or a non-driver photo ID card issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Mr. Perez’s letter asserted that minority voters in the state were nearly 20 percent more likely than white voters to lack these forms of identification – a “significant racial disparity” that the state “has failed entirely to address.” The state’s own statistics, he said, showed that “there are 81,938 minority citizens who are already registered to vote and who lack DMV-issued identification,” and who thus risk being “effectively disenfranchised” by the new law.
As she says, Voter-ID laws are like the bans on “sharia law”: counterproductive “solutions” to non-problems. Only they’re much worse because they have concrete rather than symbolic effects.