After passing a law requiring ID to vote,1 Alabama has closed a bunch of driver’s license offices – and the offices it shut down will especially impact black voters. AL.com’s John Archibald sums it up:
Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That’s Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.
Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting. […]
Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one. […]
Look at the 10 [counties] that voted most solidly for Obama? Of those, eight – again all but Dallas and the state capital of Montgomery – had their offices closed.
This was entirely predictable – and almost certainly would not have been allowed before the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision. As I wrote in an earlier post:
After the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in June’s Shelby v. Holder decision, Republican-controlled legislatures rushed to enact whatever voter ID laws they already had written.
In time, new and more extreme laws will inevitably be written to take advantage of the freedom Shelby has given states to reduce voting rights. And the conservatives on the Supreme Court may further reduce voting rights in future decisions. The worse damages of current voter ID laws are not the worst we’ll see.
Naturally, conservatives are saying that just because Alabama’s actions look, smell, flap and quack like a duck doesn’t mean it’s a duck. Jack at Ethics Alarms mocks the idea that Republicans in Alabama would deliberately make it harder for Black folks to vote:
“Make IDs essential to vote, then make it harder for blacks to get drivers licenses! What an ingenious plan! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Nobody’s going to see through that!
In the real world, sometimes outlandish plots do happen, especially when people are highly motivated. And evidence shows that voter ID laws are most likely to be proposed following an increase in minority turnout.
Is it conscious plotting, or just unconscious bias?2 I don’t know, or care, because the hidden motivations of white legislators aren’t the important thing. That kind of thinking – that it’s excusable when laws put up barriers making it harder for minorities to vote, as long as we can’t prove that white legislators had conscious evil intentions – is white-centric. Where reason asks “does this make voting racist and unfair in practice,” white-centric thinking asks “were the hearts of the white people pure?”
Jack goes on:
Guess what? Alabama had thought about the ID problem, and was prepared to deal with it, or think they are. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill announced, a day after the shift hit the fan,
“All 67 counties in Alabama have a Board of Registrars that issue photo voter I.D. cards. If, for some reason, those citizens are not able to make it to the Board of Registrars, we’ll bring our mobile I.D. van and crew to that county. By Oct. 31, our office will have brought the mobile I.D. van to every county in Alabama at least once.”
This reminded me of a passage from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, in which Arthur Dent, surprised to find out that his house is scheduled to be demolished by the local government, talks to a bureaucrat:
Mr Prosser: But, Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.
Arthur: Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.
Mr Prosser: But the plans were on display…
Arthur: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.
Mr Prosser: That’s the display department.
Arthur: With a torch.
Mr Prosser: The lights had probably gone out.
Arthur: So had the stairs.
Mr Prosser: But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?
Arthur: Yes yes I did. It was on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard.
Nothing prevented Arthur Dent from reading the plans, right? He could have gone to the local office to read them. Heck, maybe they even had a van.
In Jack’s comments, SamePenn points out that Alabama’s Republicans conveniently left themselves no time to educate voters on where they can now register to vote:
The official announcement closing the DMVs was made on September 30th. Is that 34 days to register for November 3rd elections? Well, no. It’s only 22 days until … I really don’t want to shout anymore; it hurts my fingers, so just pretend everything is either in uppercase, bold, underscored or has an exclamation mark … voter registration is closed. It happens that the deadline for voter registration in Alabama is 11 (eleven) days before the election: Saturday, Oct. 24. And the rules say that registration has to be complete before the deadline.
Alabama Republicans don’t need to absolutely prevent Black voters from voting. They just need to make registering to vote harder – board of registrars, disused lavatory, same thing – and then release the information in a way that makes it unlikely voters will hear about it.
So while voters in most mostly-white counties go to their local DMV to get their drivers licenses renewed, voters in many mostly-black counties need to know that they can get a voter ID card from the Board of Registrars3 – and then they need be able to get there during the limited hours they’re open.4
Or happen to hear about, and be available, for the four hours of one day that the mobile ID van will happen to be parked somewhere in their county.
So how good is that mobile ID van? “As of last Monday, only 29 IDs were issued from the mobile units this year and four from the state capitol, according to the secretary of state’s office.”
Yeah, that’s a reasonable substitute.
- “…the NAACP Legal Defense Fund determined in September that at least 282 ballots in the state’s June 3 primary election were not counted because of this new law. Additionally, about 40 percent of those discarded ballots came from counties with majority African American populations, while election officials in two Alabama counties with overwhelmingly white populations illegally waived the photo ID requirement for absentee voters.” From “Voter Suppression Efforts in Five States and Their Effect on the 2014 Midterm Elections” – PDF link. [↩]
- I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Even if the legislators came up with their plan by throwing darts at a board, if the darts had “just happened” to make things harder for white conservative voters, then they would have found another way. White supremacy isn’t just a matter of laws deliberately enacted; it’s also a matter of which slights the government moves to correct, or never allows to occur in the first place, versus which ones they let be. [↩]
- Imani Gandy points out that just knowing about and getting to the Board of Registrars are not the only barriers. [↩]
- And, of course, they still have to travel sometimes ridiculous distances if they want an actual driver’s license. [↩]
To be honest, since black voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat, anti-Democrat measures often hurt black voters.
It’s important to realize this if you want to have a real discussion with conservatives. If you don’t and just shout ‘racist’ at them, they will not accept that accusation, as their primary goal is to hurt Democrat voters, not black voters.
I realize that is what conservatives tell themselves (when they admit that they’re deliberately trying to deter voting). But two comments:
1) Because one pursues a racist action for instrumental reasons, rather than racist reasons, does not make the racist action any less racist. See what my post said about not making the purity of White hearts the central issue.
2) Trying to make it harder for the other side’s voters to vote using any means other than persuasion is itself anti-democratic (small d) and shouldn’t be acceptable behavior. In other words, saying “well, we were trying to stop voters from voting, but it’s only happenstance that they were Black voters” is not actually much of a defense.
This is THE argument that actually has a chance to reach conservatives, IMO. Some conservatives will try to point out that the true intent of these laws is to protect democracy from fraud and the like, but we all know that it’s really just a solution in search of a problem, and there is plenty of evidence to back this up.
I don’t think your first argument will work well, because as it was pointed out in the comment section of your previous post, conservatives often define “racist” in such a way that they don’t necessarily label “actions with disparate impact” as racist. You have to point out why the law is bad on its merits.
It’s sort of like arguing about the war on drugs with conservatives. Arguing about the disparate impact of the drug war is no way to convince any conservative, since they believe that the laws are morally justified because of , and this justification outweighs the actual effects of the law on minorities, which is an issue that doesn’t concern them as much. With a conservative, it’s often better to argue the merits of the law itself rather than its effect.
Aapje and Jeffrey, instead of saying what you think anti-racists ought to be saying, what do you say? What’s your respective opinions on what happened in Alabama?
Those words are my own, and that’s what I think. Voter ID laws are not about making elections more fair, they are about helping republicans win. I don’t think it’s a grand racist conspiracy to keep black people away from the polls, though. If black people voted republican in a given state, that state’s republicans wouldn’t adopt these laws. To the credit of the current democratic party, I don’t think they would create laws like this if black people voted republican. Democrats gerrymander less than the Republican party does, and gerrymandering is just another way to make groups of voters have lesser impacts. The democratic party really is more democratic, which shouldn’t be all that surprising.
But let’s pretend that voter fraud really was a problem. For the sake of argument, lets just say that 1% of the votes in any given election were fake, and that 1% typically favored a particular party. I would likely support a law like this, even if it resulted in less black people turning out to vote (assume state IDs can be obtained for free) I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with checking to make sure people are who they say they are when they pull the lever.
It’s important to realize this if you want to have a real discussion with conservatives. If you don’t and just shout ‘racist’ at them, they will not accept that accusation, as their primary goal is to hurt Democrat voters, not black voters.
Oh, well as long as they didn’t specifically mean to suppress black votes, then that’s no big deal. Kind of like how if I’m not trying to run over pedestrians, I’m just not trying very hard not to and I think it’s more important that I can get where I’m going quickly than to not run people over, then I’m totally OK, morally and legally speaking. I mean, that kind of indifference to other people’s rights isn’t morally troubling or an indicator that I’m not fully seeing them as people…
I don’t think that Amp’s post can be fairly characterized as “just shout ‘racist’ at them”, but A) I’m not sure they’d show this kind of callousness if white voters were the ones being disproportionately disenfranchised, even if racial disparities in voter preferences were flipped (relevant here: ‘not trying to’ is not the same as ‘trying not to’), and B) We’re supposed to reason with and try to convince someone who thinks that voter suppression is an acceptable tactic? That’s the sort of person who supposedly has a better nature that I can appeal to? No, I think even looking at it purely in terms of tactics, advocating for voter suppression to help your party win is beyond the pale* and should be condemned. Such a person will already be pretty far into the cynical “all’s fair in love and war and politics” territory; appeals to their better nature are unlikely to work.
*ETA: to be clear, it’s beyond the pale even if there’s no racially disparate impact and it’s just “let’s suppress the votes of voters in the other party!”
LOVE THIS!!!!!
I like this part of your analogy, because voting is a right, and republicans are limiting it. I wonder who realizes that the republicans are doing it to win, and who actually thinks that democrats are cheating to such a degree that a relatively minor limit on the right to vote is actually justified. My guess is that political insiders, and the most well educated conservatives know that voter fraud isn’t a problem that requires a solution, while low-normal information voters think there is rampant cheating.
People really like to think that the other team cheats. Every time I watch a football game with friends, the other side is cheating more than “our” side, and the refs are clearly letting them get away with it. During the recount fiasco in the Bush Gore election, many and perhaps most democrats were convinced that Bush only won because of cheating. As more information about the recount became available, opinions weren’t adjusted.
I think even well-intentioned but ignorant republicans should be held responsible for using their ill-informed opinion as justification to limit a right, but I still think calling these people racist is unnecessary. Republicans are pretty vocal, and in my experience, not always very self-aware.
Listen to their arguments, and if they sound racist call them out. Otherwise, it’s a pretty empty accusation.
@jeffery
I’m not entirely sure why I would adjust my opinion of the 2000 election, given final count results.
With all due respect, this seems like the white-centric thinking I objected to in my post – where complete indifference (or actual hostility) to Black people’s voting rights, and institutionalized policies that favor white voters over Black voters, isn’t “racist,” as long as the Republicans don’t make arguments that “sound racist.” From the point of view of Black voters whose access to the vote has been made more difficult, why should “never mind what the GOP did, what did they say?” be the approach?
There is almost no institutional racism, in the modern
worldUSA, that is committed by people who explicitly say “I’m doing this because I hate racial minorities.” An agreement to never call out racism except when it’s accompanied by someone saying something that “sounds racist,” would in effect be an agreement to never call out institutional racism except in its most marginal forms.I think that refusing to call racism, racism, actually makes change less likely. I don’t think the fight against the poll tax, for example, would have been more successful if people had refused to say the obvious truth that poll taxes were designed to lock out Black voters. I don’t think change is created by never saying anything that anyone could object to.
Nor do I think core Republicans are open to changing their minds and not being against voting rights, if only we stop using the dreaded “racism” word.
The way to fight back against GOP vote suppression tactics is not to persuade them to behave better; they are not persuadable. The way to fight back is to make it clear what they are doing, to shine a light on their behavior, to sue whenever a legal win is possible, and to put energy into get out the vote efforts.
Amp, that’s a hell of a good response, and I think you make a great point about using the structural racism label to help win lawsuits, because that really does seem to be the easiest way to rid the states of voter ID laws.
I just don’t know where to draw the line for things like this. I mean, let’s say that these laws really were necessary. They would still have the effect of reducing the turnout of black voters, right? But we would know for sure that the intent was different. It seems to me like calling the laws racist in that situation would make little sense. In a country with a history of racism, I imagine all sorts of perfectly fair and beneficial institutions will reflect that history, and show some sort of disparate impact. The SAT test will appear racist. Bank loans, even generated by an impartial computer program will appear to be handed out in a racist manner, based on the results of racist credit scores. How does one decide what is and isn’t just in these cases? l
Rare is the situation where there is only one solution to a problem, and that one solution has disparate impacts on minority groups. It would be the whole process, not just this one solution, that had a racist impact (by deciding that preferentially fewer black people voting was worth using this easy solution instead of a harder one).
I’ll note that a part of your case study above–free government ID, presumably with lots of failsafes for people who didn’t have required documentation as the IDs were phased in–would remove a lot of this problem: the disparate impact is because of poor documentation and poor ability to obtain identification even given correct paperwork. But I think the people who support voter ID laws–mostly Republicans–would be very against this proposal, since it’s effectively a national ID (Big Brother!) that would have to be funded by the government (spending taxpayer money!). I still think it’s unnecessary, though.
FWIW, there is arguably a second kind of racism at work with Voter ID laws, at least at the grassroots level: Some of my coworkers seem convinced that Democrats are helping a whole bunch of unauthorized immigrants to vote illegally. (But as we know, the type of voter fraud where a person pretends to be eligible to vote when they’re not is basically nonexistent.) On the one hand, if you think this is really going on it makes sense to be angry about it. On the other hand, at best this transfers most of the blame for this situation to whatever “news” organization(s) is spreading this meme.
Usually offices are closed when the population shifts, no longer justifying maintenance of the office. What are the population numbers in the counties that have seen closures?
What is the longest drive to the DMV in the neighboring county? They are DMVs, so the target audience is expected to be able to drive. So – how much of a hardship is this, in reality?
Sorry – the Left has been caught fabricating raaaacist episodes on campus and elsewhere, and inventing micro-reasons for “outrage” – I don’t doubt anyone’s good intentions, but at this point I am deeply skeptical of Lefties crying
wolfracism for political purposes.@4
Sorry, didn’t have the time to come here for a while. As for your question, I think the first thing to do is to be honest. My research indicates that the ALEA wants to close all but 4 offices and the first offices to close were the ones who issued fewest licenses. Of course, black people are less likely to have a driver license in the first place, so this may coincide with offices in black counties.
It seems like this is a much more general issue of services being cut drastically to service a small government agenda, not necessarily something that is intended to suppress black votes. I agree with Ben that I would like some sane analysis before we start shouting ‘racist’.
Frankly, both sides have their narratives. For every conspiracy theory that some on the other side believe, there is a theory from ‘your’ side. Those just look a lot more sensible since they fit your beliefs a lot better.
1) The number of real racist episodes I’ve seen reported far outnumber the small number of fabricated cases that I’ve seen reported.
2) Don’t say “raaaaacist” or similar sneer-comments if you want to continue to be welcome to post here. You are only welcome to post here as long as you can keep your obvious contempt for the views you disagree with under wraps. If you don’t like that, there are a zillion other websites out there for you to post on.
It’s mostly the smallest ones; in a ranked list of the 66 Alabama counties by population, the ~28 counties which will entirely lose offices are in the bottom I think 37 counties. (“I think” because I did this last night and then accidentally deleted the data, but that’s approximately correct.) 2 counties in the top 10-15 will lose 1 of 2 offices, as well. The smallest counties that *don’t* lose offices are in the upper half of counties by percentage of black folks, FWIW, but there didn’t seem to be an overall trend. (I suspect what happened was they looked at travel distance and kept a couple of open DMVs in counties that would have been surrounded by counties that *also* didn’t have DMVs, just to make sure nobody had to travel 2 counties yet, or something like that.)
However…none of this actually addresses Amp’s overall point, which is that this has racist impacts regardless of the purity of the souls who made the decisions, so another solution should have been found. “I did an otherwise-sensible thing that turned out to have a racist impact” is a sign that you should stop doing that thing even if you weren’t thinking about race at all when you decided to do the thing.
Unless there is a more pressing concern than the racism, right? Continuing the arrest of armed robbers will have a racist impact in the USA, but it is obviously worth doing despite this.
A white home-buyer purchasing a house in NE DC is doing his or her very small part to increase home values in the area, which has a notable racist affect. Would you tell such a home buyer to look elsewhere?
I think racism (of the disparate impact variety) is just one factor one should consider when judging these things. For example, sometimes Asian students are denied college admissions due to AA policies. This has a racist impact, and fits most definitions of the word “racist.” But many would argue that it is necessary anyway, because it helps remedy other racial injustices. I would argue that if AA doesn’t remedy other racial injustices, or it did to an almost immeasurably small degree, AA would certainly be unacceptable, and it’s supporters would be in the wrong. In this case, I’m judging AA’s worth on a scale, and I think the same should be done for racism. Racism is often treated like a binary, and when I think about it, that makes little sense. Some actions seem to be more racist than others- so racist that they could almost never be justified.
I’m not sure people will ever agree on how we should judge what is and isn’t racist, and to what degree, let alone how we should judge the utility of racist policies/action. Anyone who agrees with me that racism isn’t a bianary, may decide to use “intent” as a way of measuring how racist something is. They can use knowledge of intent to help predict future behavior. I’m of the opinion that intent really does matter.
This is why I agree with you about voter ID laws being wrong because they are either unnecessary, or the racist effects are unnecessary. I may not see the laws as all that racist, but since nothing is gained by them, I come out against them. The trouble is, people with different knowledge/priors may come to a different conclusion. This may be based on bad knowledge, or perhaps they weigh a few fraudulent votes differently than I do.
The problem is that pretty much anything has a racist impact, when people of various ethnicities are different as groups in many ways. Effectively, you guys are asking for all measures to be examined for their impact on the various racial groups. My objection is that you fail to draw that logical conclusion and are stuck in blaming certain groups for consequences that they didn’t consider. Your approach is 100% self-righteous/bullying, which just puts people off.
What do you think happens when people get told over and over that they are doing racist things, when they didn’t even take race into consideration. A few will convert to your point of view, but many will just draw this conclusion:
1. I didn’t take race into consideration, but used guidelines that have no racial element in them.
2. These people are thus crying wolf over anything, so I will stop listening/assume they have another agenda/etc.
A bridge has just been burned, partisanship strengthened, etc.
PS. It may also be the case that a law/measure is just, but still has a disparate impact against certain groups.