Barriers to the Ballot in Alabama's Black Belt
Yet, as Alabama’s story today tells, the Voting Rights Act was not ironclad. As the cornerstone of the movement for the franchise, Alabama has also played the part of headquarters of resistance, a long legal and legislative guerrilla war against voting rights that culminated in 2013’s
Shelby County v. Holder case, one where officials in the Alabama county successfully sued for all of the former dominion of Jim Crow to be released from federal VRA oversight. That victory, and the structural barriers to voting erected in its aftermath, are a serious—and largely unacknowledged—impediment to Democrat Doug Jones’s chances in the special election for the state’s open Senate seat on Tuesday.
That’s easier said than done. While Alabama did have the fifth-highest black turnout of any state
in the 2014 midterm elections, it’s well-known that black turnout in midterms
is much lower generally than it is in presidential elections. And while special elections vary widely in terms of turnout and racial dynamics,
according to The New York Times, the Alabama secretary of state’s office estimates that only about a million people overall will vote in Tuesday’s election. That would be good for a paltry 26 percent overall, predictions that would follow an
incredibly low 14 percent turnout for the Republican primary run-off, and speak to the general level of interest in the special election. They probably don’t bode well for making big gains among black voters.
In 2015, state Republicans announced the closures of 31 DMV offices across the state, ostensibly in a cost-saving measure. But AL.com journalists Kyle Whitmore and John Archibald
found that the closures were concentrated in the black belt, and that of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of nonwhite voters, the state closed DMV offices in eight, and left them without offices entirely, meaning those voters either had to travel long distances to other counties to get licenses or visit special registrar’s offices in order to vote.
Facing pressure, the state relented on some of the closings, instead operating a handful of the offices for fewer hours, but a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation still found that “African Americans residing in the Black Belt region of Alabama disproportionately underserved by ALEA’s driver licensing services, causing a disparate and adverse impact on the basis of race.” In an agreement with DOT
last December, the state did agree to expand the hours of some of the offices.
Still, the incident illustrates the structures in the state that have only been nourished post-
Shelby County that uniquely limit black voters. Racial disparities in access to acceptable forms of voter ID are a common objection to such strict laws, but they can overlook broader systemic effects of the laws and their rollouts on turnout.
A study of Kansas’s strict ID law found that advertisement of the law alone decreased turnout, even as the law’s actual effects on ballot accessibility further cratered turnout themselves. It’s also just likely that implementing more restrictive voter laws chills faith in the system and turnout among people who’ve always been on the margins.
That last point is especially salient in Alabama, where officials have steadfastly refused to implement the kind of reforms that have continued the work of the Voting Rights Act and continually expanded black turnout over the years. Early voting, which has been
a key factor for other states in increasing black turnout,
is not permitted in Alabama. The state also doesn’t have no-fault absentee voting, preregistration for teens, online voter registration, or same-day registration. In all, it’s harder to vote in Alabama than just about anywhere else, a dynamic that should tend towards cooling the turnout of people who’ve only been allowed to vote in the state for 50 years.
Until this year, the state retained a white-supremacist “
moral turpitude” clause allowing registrars to block black people with felonies from voting. Although Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill in May reversing that rule, a federal court ruled that the state had no obligation to ever inform people with felonies that they could register to vote.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill—who has supported Moore even since the allegations—refused to invest any state resources on information or education after that reversal, and has also announced his opposition to automatic voter registration in DMVs,
saying that the law “cheapen the work” of civil-rights icons like the state’s own Congressman John Lewis. And with some activists attempting to enforce that law and sign up ex-felons to vote, Moore wasted no time
in blowing the dog whistle again, tweeting that “Democrat operatives in Alabama are REGISTERING THOUSANDS OF FELONS all across the state in an effort to swing the US Senate election to Doug Jones!”
Barriers to the Ballot in Alabama's Black Belt
