The fire next time

THE 45-mile drive from Union Springs, seat of Bullock County, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, might not seem very arduous. But for some locals, the distance itself is not the main obstacle. Going to Montgomery, as some now must to get a driver’s licence, means the best part of a day off work for two people, the test-sitter and his chauffeur (there is no public transport). That is a stretch for employees in inflexible, minimum-wage jobs—and there are lots of them in Union Springs, a tidy town in which the missing letters on the shuttered department store’s façade betray a quiet decline, surrounded by the sort of spacious but dilapidated poverty characteristic of Alabama’s Black Belt.

To some, this trek is not just an inconvenience but a scandal. The state’s voters must now show one of several eligible photo-IDs to cast a ballot, of which driving licences are the most common kind. Last year, supposedly to save money, the issuing office in Union Springs, formerly open for a day each week, was closed, along with others in mostly black, Democratic-leaning counties. After an outcry, the service was reinstated for a day per month; at other times, applicants head to Montgomery. For James Poe, a funeral-home director and head of the NAACP in Bullock County, the combination of a new voter-ID law and reduced hours is “insanity”. Such impediments may not be as flagrant as when, as a young man in Union Springs, he had to interpret the constitution in order to vote, but, he thinks, they are obnoxious all the same.

For Mr Poe, the explanation of what he calls “a slick Jim Crow” is simple: “Republicans want fewer people to vote.” Far from it, insists John Merrill, who as a Republican legislator helped craft the new law and now oversees its implementation as Alabama’s secretary of state. Anyone without a driving licence can apply for a free, alternative ID—in Union Springs, at the friendly registrar’s office in the courthouse. True, fewer than 8,000 have been issued, but that, Mr Merrill says, is because not many people need them (others disagree). He pledges to ensure that anyone who wants an ID gets one, even if he has to go to their house himself. Turnout soared in the recent primary, he points out (though only on the Republican side). As for racial discrimination at the polls: “That day is over.”

Across the Edmund Pettus bridge

The nuances, malleable data and emotive claims in the row over Alabama’s voting law are typical of similar disputes raging across the South, in and out of court, and elsewhere. Some might not be resolved before the presidential election and may cloud its outcome. At their heart is the question of how far America has escaped the racial traumas of its past.

Altogether 17 states will have new rules in place for this presidential election. Reverend William Barber, a civil-rights activist who is leading the fight against North Carolina’s changes (among the most sweeping), shares Mr Poe’s outrage. These are, he says, summarising the general complaint, “an all-out retrogressive attack on voting rights”, which his generation must defend, just as a previous one secured the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965. Thus his slogan: “This is our Selma.”

Yet if this patchwork of initiatives is indeed an assault on hallowed rights, it is, metaphorically speaking, a crime without a body or incontrovertible smoking gun. That is partly due to the fiddly nature of the reforms. Chief among them are requirements for photo-IDs which, surveys suggest, minority citizens are more likely to lack (in Texas, which has the toughest ID law, you can vote with a gun licence but not a student or employee card). Other revisions include the curtailment of early-voting periods and the ending of election-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. North Carolina’s law contains all these elements: all, say its critics, will disproportionately affect minorities. Elsewhere there are conflicts over the need to produce proof of citizenship to register to vote (recently discounted by a court in Kansas) and the pruning of electoral rolls.

Innocent or insidious, these tweaks are not as luridly discriminatory as the blatant, often bloody shenanigans of the past. Moreover their impact is difficult to prove conclusively. A study by the Government Accountability Office found that, in Kansas, tighter ID laws led to a drop in turnout of roughly 2% between 2008 and 2012, and slightly more in Tennessee; younger and black voters were more likely to be affected. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, also calculated that strict ID laws depress minority turnout, notably among Hispanics. There are worrisome projections: Arturo Vargas of the NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino lobby group, reckons 875,000 Latino voters could be impeded by new regulations in November, 90% of them in Texas.

But, as in Alabama, there is contrary evidence, too. For instance, in the congressional elections of 2014, the first held under North Carolina’s new regime, black turnout rose—a bump Mr Barber’s side attributes to an exciting Senate race and an energetic get-out-the-vote push. As it happens, Alabama’s turnout crashed in 2014, which officials ascribe to that year’s dull, incumbent-heavy races. Those explanations point up a basic evidential hitch: electoral behaviour is driven by many factors, from the political (a historic black candidate) to the personal (getting stuck at work). Demonstrating a single rule’s consequences is tricky; proving why people fail to vote is particularly fraught. And lots of these measures are yet to be tested.

A rainstorm with no umbrella

Hardly surprising, then, that opponents of these changes, including the federal government, have sometimes struggled to persuade courts that they violate the VRA or are unconstitutional. “They’re wasting a lot of money,” says Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which joined Virginia in a successful defence of voter-ID; a federal court recently upheld North Carolina’s law. On the other hand, Texas’s has been judged discriminatory, as, this week, were Ohio’s cuts to early voting; several states, including Alabama, face ongoing litigation.

Perhaps if the burden of proof fell more squarely on the laws’ proponents, the outcomes of these cases might be more consistent—especially if circumstantial evidence weighed more heavily. Exhibit A might be their incriminating timing.

The key date, say activists, was June 25th 2013. That was when the Supreme Court neutralised the aspect of the VRA that required nine mostly southern states with records of discrimination, plus parts of six others, to clear changes to their voting practices with the Justice Department or a federal court before they took effect. Edward Blum, a pro-reform campaigner who helped bring the suit, argues that, having “done what it was designed to do”, the relevant section of the VRA had become an infringement of state sovereignty; in various southern states, he notes, black turnout is now higher than in other bits of America. A narrow majority of the court duly ruled that, while prejudice persisted, the country had “changed dramatically”, and that the formula used to apply the pre-clearance requirement was outdated. Dissenting, Ruth Bader Ginsburg adduced the 700-odd discriminatory measures blocked by the Justice Department between 1982 and 2006; she likened the decision to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”.

Not all the places now embroiled in controversy had been fingered for preclearance. But several were, and their new laws might have been rejected—as some apparently realised. Alabama, recipient of 24 objections by the Justice Department since 1990, passed its voter-ID law in 2011, but held it back; it announced that it would implement it the day after the ruling. North Carolina’s legislators rushed theirs through a month later, one remarking that the VRA “headache” had been lifted. Texas’s law was blocked, then revived. That telling opportunism lies behind Mr Barber’s view that black voters now have “less protection than on August 7th, 1965”, the day after the Voting Rights Act was signed.

Exhibit B in the circumstantial case against the new laws is the ropey rationale for passing them. The main reason cited for the ID requirements is the need to combat fraud. That sounds reasonable, except that the kind of impersonation they prevent is vanishingly rare. In Alabama, argues the NAACP’s Legal Defence Fund, there was one documented case of voter-impersonation in the 12 years before the ID law was passed. The laws’ supporters, such as Mr Adams, dismiss these quibbles: “How much criminal activity is OK?”, he demands. Mr Merrill, in Alabama, says the state should always try to improve, just as its triumphant college football team constantly recruits new players.

If there were no other cause for suspicion, that perfectionist argument might wash. But there is, including—Exhibit C—the roster of implicated states. Several feature growing minority populations, tightening political competition, or both. In 2008 Barack Obama won North Carolina by a whisker; Wisconsin and Virginia, two other swing states, are also involved. The history, like the geography, is fishy. As Richard Hasen of the University of California recounts, the tinkering began after the debacle in Florida in 2000, which showed that “in close elections, the rules matter”. Mr Obama’s election gave it another impetus; the Republicans’ statehouse victories in 2010, and then the Supreme Court’s ruling, facilitated further spurts. This, alleges Mr Vargas, the Latino advocate, is “the status quo trying to hold on to its political power for as long as possible”.

After the end of history

“Voting in the South,” says Mr Barber, “has always been about the issue of race.” If that remains true, and if election regimes cannot be assessed in isolation from history, practices that are permissible in one part of the country—New York has no early voting, for example—might indeed be deemed discriminatory in another. Occasional inopportune comments by bigoted politicians, such as the legislators in Alabama caught referring to black voters as “aborigines”, bolster that gloomy analysis. A milder judgment is that, these days, race is a proxy for partisanship, since minority Americans mostly vote Democratic, rather than a target in itself; though as Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Centre for Justice says, it is scant consolation for black people to be disenfranchised for their party allegiance rather than simply for their skin colour.

At the least, many of these reforms imply a wilful failure to understand the constraints of poverty, especially the rural, poorly educated sort. In Alabama applicants for a free voter ID must swear, on pain of prosecution, that they have no other valid kind. That, for some, is offputting, as is the paperwork required, in some states that provide such loopholes, to vote without an ID. Early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting are useful to people leading hard-pressed, sometimes disrupted lives.

In truth, though, as some activists acknowledge, these hurdles are not the only barrier to greater minority influence. Nationwide turnout was already low among Latinos and black youngsters—a disengagement that, in down-at-heel places such as Bullock County, is at once tragic and understandable. The possible closure of a nearby prison is a bigger preoccupation in Union Springs than the election. “We don’t have any industries trying to knock the door down,” laments Saint Thomas, the mayor. “You just about got to beg ‘em.” Mr Poe of the NAACP offered free rides to Montgomery for anyone keen to get their ID there. No one, he says disconsolately, has taken him up on it.