It should be said that none of this is new. Most Americans are familiar with race-based voter suppression—the poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses of Jim Crow—but those are part of a larger history of partisan voter suppression that stretches back to the early 19th century. After a flood of Irish immigrants tipped the electoral scales and threatened Whig electoral prospects in New York, observes Alexander Keyssar in his book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, Whig lawmakers rushed to pass tough new registration rules for New York City, which contained the largest concentration of Irish voters. What’s more, in states like Missouri, Maryland, and Indiana, Know-Nothing and Whig lawmakers sought to delay voting rights for naturalized citizens, fearing the political consequences of large-scale immigrant enfranchisement. It’s clear that these laws are driven by partisanship—an effort to manipulate the rules of elections to blunt the impact of demographic change on Republican prospects. It explains why North Carolina Republicans coupled their push for voter ID with an assault on student voting (closing precincts near colleges and universities and blocking students from running for office) which leans Democratic. Indeed, partisan voter suppression is Texas Attorney General Greg Abott’s defense against allegations of racial discrimination with its new voting law. “The redistricting decisions of which DOJ complains were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations,” wrote Abott in a brief, “and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.”
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:03:55 +0000
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