Voting rights are still under attack
Fifty-eight years after passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, the fight for equal access to the ballot box goes on. Exercising the right to vote — which President Joe Biden described Sunday as crossing “the threshold of democracy and liberty” — is still more difficult for African Americans than for others, and that fact is a scandal and a disgrace.
Biden was speaking at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil rights marchers led by John Lewis were savagely beaten on March 7, 1965. That atrocity spurred Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law later that year. Until his death in 2020, Lewis led an annual commemorative pilgrimage to the bridge. Now it continues without him.
This was not the first time Biden participated in marking the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” but it was his first time doing so as president. He said that without the right to vote, “nothing is possible,” and he warned that “this fundamental right remains under assault.”
And that is true. In 1965, Southern Democrats, or “Dixiecrats,” used the power they held in Alabama and other Southern states to bar African Americans from voting. Today, it is the Republican Party that seeks — and finds — ways to weaken Black political power, not just in the South but elsewhere as well. And it is Republicans in Congress who have blocked two bills that would partly address this betrayal of the nation’s professed democratic ideals.
Before we focus on the GOP’S cynicism and hypocrisy, though, let’s consider one of the injustices that our political leaders rarely even talk about, let alone address: In every election, it takes longer for Black and Latino voters to cast their ballots at polling places than it takes white voters.
A 2020 report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the November 2018 midterm elections, 7 percent of African American voters and 6.6 percent of Latino voters waited in line for 30 minutes or longer to vote, while only 4.1 percent of white voters had to wait that long. The disparity was most pronounced “in the southeastern United States, home to large shares of nonwhite voters,” the report said.
A study of the 2016 election, led by UCLA economist Keith Chen and based on cellphone data, had a similar finding: Voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods were 74 percent more likely to wait for more than half an hour than
facing the same obligations.
The impact of the funding shortfall is especially pronounced in New York City, as low salaries and the skyrocketing cost of living have led to an exodus of experienced defense attorneys and staff. This loss of qualified public defenders, many of whom would have made this vital work their lifelong career if it was sustainable, is a threat to the people facing trial who deserve fair representation.
In total, Hochul’s budget comes in $127 million less than the needed level of funding for public defender programs both to make up for the austerity budgets of past years and to keep pace with the funding increases for prosecutors. There is also likely over $100 million needed to fund the increase in assigned counsel rates, as well to assure there is a sufficient number of attorneys willing to take on this work in every county in the state.
Even prosecutors themselves believe the inequity is wrong, with J. Anthony Jordan — Washington County district attorney and president of the state District Attorneys Association — recently telling Gotham Gazette that funding of “the justice system should be balanced.”
Even more than a balanced financial plan, a budget should be a statement of balanced priorities. Public defenders with a reasonable caseload can be ready to proceed to trial in a timely manner, helping to reduce stays in deadly jails like Rikers Island. More importantly, defenders bridge the gap in services to many people who are arrested, including identifying issues with mental health and substance use as well as obtaining services that may help avoid incarceration altogether.
Lawmakers still have an opportunity to prioritize equal justice in their one-house budgets coming in March and provide parity for both sides of the courtroom.
Ultimately, when they sit down to negotiate the final budget, Hochul and legislative leaders would do well to remember that funding that favors one side of the legal system reinforces bias and erodes efforts to further public safety. That’s something New York truly can’t afford.