After passing a law requiring ID to vote, ((“…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.)) 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? ((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.)) 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 Registrars ((Imani Gandy points out that just knowing about and getting to the Board of Registrars are not the only barriers.)) – and then they need be able to get there during the limited hours they’re open. ((And, of course, they still have to travel sometimes ridiculous distances if they want an actual driver’s license.))
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.
@beth: Thank you