A new yet old fight
Give Us the Ballot The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America Ari Berman Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 372 pp., $28
Fifty years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, “Give Us the Ballot” makes a powerful case that voting rights are under assault in America. Current events underscore the book’s timeliness. In September, Alabama announced it was closing 31 driver’s license offices, making it even harder for African Americans to comply with the state’s 2011 law requiring voters to show government-issued IDs to cast ballots. As author Ari Berman points out, Alabama is one of nine Republican-controlled states to pass voter ID laws since 2010, and those are only the most blatant restrictions.
Efforts to roll back the act’s protections for minority voters are nothing new, Berman demonstrates; the first legal challenge to the law was filed five days after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it in 1965. When the Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act a year later, Southern legislators turned from preventing African Americans from voting to diluting their votes. Black-majority counties were consolidated with larger white ones; at-large elections and multi-member districts made it nearly impossible for African American candidates to gain office. Section 5 of the act, which required seven Southern states with histories of voting discrimination to submit any changes in their voting laws for federal review, became the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s instrument for preventing such manipulations.
“The work of the voting section shifted from making sure people could register and vote freely to stopping election changes that denied minority voters political representation,” Berman writes. But this shift garnered high-profile critics, ining cluding liberal-turned-neoconservative Abigail Thernstrom, who argued in 1979 that Section 5 “betrayed the color-blind ideal the VRA was meant to advance.” The Reagan-era Justice Department seized on arguments like this to justify limiting civil rights enforcement to individual cases of intentional discrimination, which were difficult to prove.
Judging voting law changes on the basis of their discriminatory effects, wrote a hard-charging young lawyer named John Roberts, “would establish essentially a quota system for electoral politics.” The Roberts-orchestrated crusade against the “effects test” expansion of the Voting Rights Act failed in 1982, when Congress passed a 25year-extension, but the seeds of the counterrevolution had been sown.
They were watered by Republican National Committee chair Lee Atwater, who in 1990 developed a strategy to advocate the creation of majority-black districts in the South so that the other districts would become whiter and, he hoped, more Republican. Civil rights groups’ support of this strategy was vehemently rebuffed by the African American co-chair of North Carolina’s redistricting committee, who warned that black voters would “find themselves confined to ‘political reservations.’ ”
Majority-minority districts did elect more people of color to local governing bodies and the U.S. Congress. But they gave the Vot- Rights Act’s opponents a potent tool for recasting a law designed to redress injustices as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Those were the words of Justice Antonin Scalia during the oral arguments in Shelby County vs. Holder, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision making Section 5 unenforceable.
The increasingly diverse electorate fostered by the act had made Barack Obama president, but it had also prompted a backlash of voting-restrictive legislation across the country. AntiVRA activists could be astonishingly frank about their motives. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” said the founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helped orchestrate more than half the voter ID bills introduced in 2011-12. “Our leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
And go down it did in the wake of the Shelby decision. Berman closes with a grim catalog of Shelby’s consequences, mingling statistics with personal stories of the disenfranchised, such as the 83-year-old mail carrier turned away at the polls in the Texas county where he had lived and voted for 60 years. There’s no question about the author’s political point of view (Berman is a contributing writer for the Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute), but he buttresses his scathing indictment with extensive documentation. National voter turnout fell to its lowest level since 1942 in the 2014 midterm elections, and the new barriers to voting may have provided the margin of victory in close races.
It’s not a happy ending, though Berman strains to find hope in the renewed commitment to voter registration of a younger generation of civil rights activists. They will need that commitment to combat the organized opposition to expansive voting rights whose history is traced in this important and distressing book.