Eric Holder’s 2014 Racial Politics
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The Attorney General tries to reverse a Supreme Court ruling by the back door.
For Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.
The real current Governor, Republican Pat McCrory, signed a law in August that requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polling station, including a state driver’s license or military ID. Voters who show up without one can still cast a provisional ballot pending their return with a photo ID. The law also shortens early voting to 10 days from 17 and ends a program that preregistered high school students before they were eligible to vote.
According to Mr. Holder, this amounts to a shocking return to the Jim Crow era. He describes these modest measures to secure the integrity of the ballot as “aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African Americans.” And he is suing the state to bring it back under the federal supervision of the Voting Rights Act for all of its future voting-law changes.
The Supreme Court held in June that such federal “preclearance” under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act had outlived its usefulness in states where black and white voter registration and participation rates are roughly equal. That should have been good news, but now Mr. Holder wants to haul North Carolina and Texas back into long-term federal supervision through a back door.
Under Section 3 of the Act, states can be required to get federal preclearance if a court finds that the state has intentionally discriminated against minorities in its voting laws. That’s a high legal bar that the Justice Department will find hard to prove, especially since many of the two states’ voter ID provisions are widespread in other states.
One claim is that North Carolina’s shorter early voting period will have a more pronounced impact on African Americans, who made up 23% of registered voters in North Carolina in 2012 and cast 29% of early ballots. But while the state reduced the number of days for early voting, it maintained the number of total hours for early voting. That change maintains ample time for voters to cast a ballot but reduces the burden on county election officials who have to man early voting sites in the run-up to Election Day.
Ditto a concern that the law disproportionately disenfranchises black voters who are less likely to have a driver’s licence: North Carolina offers free state-issued photo ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Another gripe is that North Carolina won’t accept student ID cards as adequate at the polls, but the reason is simple: State residence is required to vote in North Carolina, and students in the state often come from other states or countries.
Courts have already reviewed similar laws in other states and found them legal. In 2008, in a 6-3 decision written by liberal former Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter ID law. In 2011, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that the Peach State’s voter ID law was constitutional, calling its photo ID requirements a “minimal, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory restriction.” Thirty-four states now require voters to show some form of photo ID.
The worst argument against such laws is that they must be racially motivated because there is so little evidence of voter fraud. Yet no less that former Justice Stevens said in his opinion in the Indiana case that “flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, [and] that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years.” Anyone who thinks voter fraud doesn’t exist hasn’t lived in Chicago or Texas, among other places.
It’s telling that Mr. Holder prefers to file lawsuits rather than take up the Supreme Court’s invitation to modernize the Voting Rights Act for current racial conditions. The Congressional Black Caucus has said it is working on a new formula for preclearance, but such legislative labor doesn’t get the headlines that lawsuits against GOP-run states do.
All the evidence suggests that Mr. Holder’s real motive here is political. Portraying voter ID laws as racist helped to drive Democratic voter turnout among minorities in 2012, and the White House wants a repeat in 2014. Never mind if the suits eventually fail in court. The goal is to elect more Democrats in the meantime, even if it means needlessly increasing racial polarization.
A version of this article appeared October 8, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Holder’s 2014 Racial PoliticsHolder’s 2014 Racial Politics.
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