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Sunday, December 22nd, 2013

Researchers Find Factors Tied To Voting Restriction Bills Are ‘Basically All Racial’

Author:     ERICH LACH
Source:     Talking Points Memo/Perspectives on Politics
Publication Date:     December 20, 2013, 4:02 PM EST
 Link: Researchers Find Factors Tied To Voting Restriction Bills Are ‘Basically All Racial’
Stephan:   It is very difficult to see how the Rightists on the Supreme Court could not understand or foresee that gutting the Voting Rights Act would lead to voter suppression. It is much easier to understand their decision from the perspective that this was their deliberate purpose. In any case, the research is now coming in, as this report recounts, and it all confirms what was obvious: all voting restriction bills passed in the Red value states have one purpose: to decrease the number of people of color, seniors, students, and poor people voting. Which is to say its purpose is to rig the elections to give Republicans a better chance of winning. It is just the second phase of the effort that began with gerrymandering. See: http://journals.cambridge.org/actio/displayAbstract?aid=9122051 or: DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592713002843 to see the research paper upon which this report is based.

The debate over voting rights has gone to college.

Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics — Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O’Brien, an associate professor of Political Science — recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled ‘Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies,’ the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

‘We looked at proposed and passage over this period, and we looked at just 2011 specifically,’ Bentele told TPM in an interview this week. ‘And you have this consistent emergence — over and over and over — these partisan and racial factors are the most strongly associated with these outcomes.’

The paper focused on a range of restrictive voter access legislation. That means not just voter ID bills, but also the regulation of groups who register voters, the shortening of early voting periods, and other issues. And these efforts were not limited geographically. Restrictive voter access legislation was proposed in nearly every state in the country during the six-year period looked at, and at least one restrictive change passed […]

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