Donald Trump’s remarks following the killing of a young paralegal by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated widespread opprobrium—and no one was more cutting than many of the president’s fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were just a few among the dozens of party stalwarts who lambasted the president—and who made clear their own strong objections to bigotry, anti-Semitism, and racism.
But what if Republicans wanted to demonstrate their commitment to racial equality in a way that goes beyond simply chastising the president? Many possibilities come to mind, but there is one opportunity to do something that would be both practical and symbolic.
Unfortunately, that opportunity is born out of some shamefully cynical behavior on the part of too many Republicans, particularly at the state level. Over the past several years, in several states, there appear to have been attempts to reduce black voter turnout. Given the historic mistreatment of African Americans, from slavery to Jim Crow, this effort is not only disturbingly anti-democratic, but also redolent of some of the ugliest chapters in American history.
We’re not talking about voter ID laws, which mandate that when people turn up at the polls they should be able to prove they are who they say are. That’s just basic good governance, and a useful check on voter fraud. We’re highly dubious of the various studies, cited widely in the press, that claim that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. Contra media reports, the lack of evidence of voter fraud hardly proves it doesn’t exist; if the fraud is effective, it’s ipso facto undetected. It’s little wonder, then, that polls suggest large majorities of all races of Americans support these requirements.
But when states impose laws mandating voter ID, as many have done in recent years, they should at the same time do what they can to make it simple to obtain the required ID. An alarming number of Republican-led states have done just the opposite. There’s Alabama, for example, which after imposing a voter ID law in 2014 shut down a number of DMVs, citing budgetary cutbacks, that happened to be located disproportionately in the state’s so-called “black belt.” And Texas, which has done nothing to reduce its dearth of DMVs, even though some residents (admittedly these are edge cases) would have to travel upwards of 100 miles to obtain a photo ID. Needless to say, this is an arduous task for the poor—who are disproportionately minorities—particularly if they lack a driver’s license, which is the whole reason they would need to travel to the DMV in the first place. Moves like these only serve to undermine the very legitimate case for voter ID.
Other states have engaged in different forms of chicanery. Indiana Republicans have increased the number of early voting stations in majority-white counties, while curtailing them in largely black areas. Florida has reduced early voting days, eliminating them on the Sunday before Election Day. At the time that law was passed, a state GOP official noted, “the Sunday before Election Day was one of [the Republicans’] targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves.”
North Carolina, meanwhile, greatly reduced early voting as well as same-day voter registration. (Studies suggest minorities are overwhelmingly more likely than white voters to avail themselves of both of those services.) Indeed, those two moves by North Carolina, coupled with the imposition of a strict voter ID law, were ultimately struck down by a federal appeals court, which found that they targeted African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.”
State officials in all these cases were able to offer non-sinister explanations. And given the fact that African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, these moves were surely taken more out of partisanship than bigotry. Some other recently imposed voting restrictions make that obvious: Texas, for example, now allows concealed carry gun permits as valid voter identification but not student IDs. That law is clearly partisan in intent. But the cumulative effect of many of these new voting restrictions is still disturbing, whatever their intent may have been. Republicans at the national and state level should do what they can to remove many of these impediments.
The fairly open secret underlining this is that Republicans don’t really compete for black votes. From skipping NAACP meetings to not making even minimal efforts to canvass majority-African-American neighborhoods, the party of Lincoln has simply stopped bothering. That, as the cliché has it, is “political malpractice.” But moving from shrugging at black voters to throwing sand in the gears for those who want to vote? That’s democratic malpractice.
