Advocates fear for future of voting rights
Trump’s victory seen as threat in pivotal moment
After an extraordinarily contentious election, crucial elements of the rules that determine how Americans vote will be under assault from conservatives and facing legal challenges heading toward the Supreme Court as Donald Trump prepares to become president.
Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election — made before he won — and his false declaration after his victory that “millions of people” voted illegally for Hillary Clinton made headlines.
They also amplified long-standing Republican claims that rampant voter fraud justified a welter of state laws making it more difficult to register and vote. Democrats say the laws are not about combating fraud but about suppressing the vote of minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.
Trump will have enormous power to shape future policy on voting.
“The last time we had a national government that was as hostile to the protection of minority voting rights as we may have with this president was probably near the end of the first Reconstruction” after the Civil War, said Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford University law professor, who was a deputy assistant attorney general under President Barack Obama until 2015.
‘Way overboard’
Such concerns could prove overstated. Beyond warnings of fraud, Trump has offered little specific about his views on voting rights. Four Trump transition officials did not reply to emailed requests for comment.
One conservative scholar of election law, Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, called the worries “way overboard.”
“The emphasis may be a little different,” he said. “But this idea that when Republicans come in, they’re suddenly going to stop enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other laws — the evidence doesn’t bear it out.”
Trump will take office at a pivotal moment in a battle over the rules governing voting and elections, one in which voting-rights advocates seemed to be gaining an upper hand.
At least two major voting lawsuits against the Texas and North Carolina state governments seem likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court. In both, federal courts of appeals this summer voided or modified Republican laws requiring voters to produce photo IDs, saying they disproportionately reduced minorities’ turnout.
The court has upheld photo ID requirements before. But the new cases marshal far more evidence of their outsize effect on minority voters.
The Supreme Court also seems certain to address a second important question: whether majority parties in state and local governments can gerrymander political maps during redistricting, redrawing boundaries in ways that solidify their hold on power.
Gerrymandering has long been illegal. But while justices have said partisan gerrymandering is wrong, they have never decided whether they can outlaw it.
Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a linchpin of some of those cases, will fall to a Justice Department whose likely attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., is viewed with deep suspicion by civil rights advocates.
‘Motor voter’ law
One Trump adviser, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, is among the most aggressive national crusaders for voting restrictions.
Entering a meeting with Trump last week, Mr. Kobach was photographed carrying a sheaf of policy recommendations.
The visible text proposed to “Draft Amendments to the National Voter” — an apparent reference to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the “motor voter” law that has come under sharp attack from Republicans.
The law prohibits states from purging voters from the rolls for technical reasons like moving within a district, and imposes a waiting period and other requirements to remove voters.
Kobach, who once suggested that Obama was plotting to replace U.S. voters with socialist-leaning legalized immigrants, is the leading advocate of requiring everyone to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote instead of swearing an oath. Critics say the poor are far less likely to have those documents, and the costs of obtaining them essentially amount to a poll tax, which has long been unconstitutional.