Voting wrongs

IT IS the morning of November 9th, the day after the election, and America is waking up to find out who is the new president. The result turns on the vote in North Carolina, where the ballot papers are being recounted. Even when the tally is in, the result will be in doubt. North Carolina’s new voting laws are subject to a legal challenge, which could take weeks for the courts to resolve. Both sides complain that the election is being stolen; the acrimony, sharpened by allegations of racial discrimination, makes Florida’s hanging chads and the Supreme Court’s ruling in favour of George W. Bush in 2000 seem like a church picnic.

This is not as fanciful as it sounds. America organises its democracy differently from other rich countries. Each state writes its own voting laws, there is no national register of eligible voters and no form of ID that is both acceptable in all polling booths and held by everyone. Across the country, 17 states have new voting laws that, in November, will be tested for the first time in a presidential contest. In several states these laws face legal challenges, which allege that they have been designed in order to discourage African-Americans and Latinos from voting. It is past time to start worrying about where these challenges might lead.

The X factor

The new laws date largely from a Supreme Court decision in 2013. Before then, many states in the South, and a couple elsewhere, that had spent much of the 20th century finding ingenious ways to prevent minorities from voting, had to clear any changes to their voting laws with the Justice Department or a federal court. Three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled the country had “changed dramatically” and that the formula for choosing which states were covered was outdated. That allowed all the states to write laws unsupervised.

Handed power over the rules for electing themselves, Republican politicians in southern statehouses have, unsurprisingly, tilted them in their own favour. Early voting, which non-whites (who lean Democratic) are keen on, has been restricted. Another change has been to limit the kinds of ID that are acceptable at a polling station. In Texas student IDs are out, handgun licences are in.

The authors of these laws protest that they have nothing to do with race or political advantage and claim that they are necessary to guard against voter fraud. Yet there is scant evidence of fraud. To claim otherwise is cynical and corrosive. In the 12 years before Alabama passed its new voter-ID law there was one documented case of impersonation.

The second argument made, in southern states, is that the new voting laws merely bring them in line with those elsewhere in the country, some of which do not allow early voting at all. This is true, but tantamount to an admission of guilt: politicians in some safely Democratic districts in the north have not been above fiddling with election rules and redrawing district boundaries to protect incumbents either. Indeed, it is an argument for a more general change.

The worst of all the arguments for the new voting laws is that casting a ballot should not be made too easy, because if people are not clever enough to understand the rules governing elections they should not be entrusted with choosing the government. Any political party that hopes for lower turnout has lost its way. William F. Buckley, a conservative pundit, once wrote that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than by 2,000 members of Harvard’s faculty. Republican lawmakers must decide whether they still believe in the good sense of those they aspire to govern, or whether they lost that faith somewhere on the way to the statehouse.

The new voting laws suggest the Supreme Court underestimated the grip the past still has on the present. Were politicians really concerned about voter fraud they would hand over the running of elections and voter registers to non-partisan bodies. Unfortunately, this will not happen. Why disarm when you have all the bullets? As a second best, therefore, the courts should expedite cases on voting laws to reduce the chances of legal challenges after the election.