According to the group’s report, the turnout gap between Black and white voters in those former Section 5 counties has grown by 11 percentage points since the Shelby decision, between 2012 and 2022. The study relied on nearly one billion voter files to estimate that, had the decision never occurred, the white-Black turnout gap would have nevertheless grown, but by just six percentage points.
Though that difference may appear small, the study’s authors contend that such gaps are “potentially huge” in modern politics: Since 2012, at least 62 elections for Senate, governor and president in states with Section 5 counties were decided by under five percentage points.
“Obviously, it matters from a moral standpoint, but it also matters because the margins are significant, particularly given how close elections are around the country,” said Kareem Crayton, a senior director for voting rights and representation at the Brennan Center.
After the Shelby decision, state legislatures across the country passed an array of new voting restrictions, including new voter ID laws, and they purged hundreds of thousands of names from voter rolls. But turnout is affected by a number of things, including the time it takes to vote and other motivational factors like close races or polarizing candidates, making for an imprecise statistic for trying to measure the affect of those laws, many argue. And the impact of the Supreme Court decision in 2013 was far wider than simply new voting laws; any number of voting procedures such as changing polling locations or cleaning voter rolls were no longer subject to federal approval.
The study identified a significant racial turnout gap nationwide, beyond the counties previously covered by Section 5. In the 2020 election, 9.3 million more people would have voted if nonwhite voters had participated at the same rate as white voters. In the 2022 midterms, that total would have been 13.9 million ballots.
The gap persisted across education and income lines. Though turnout drops across all racial and ethnic lines in lower-income communities, poorer white voters still turn out at a higher rate than their nonwhite peers, according to the study.
The widening turnout gap is a “big deal,” said Jake Grumbach, a professor of policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Democratic institutions in the U.S. were getting healthier since 1965. And this is the first time the trend has reversed, really, in the post civil rights era. And so I think that’s the damaging point.”
u r not srs.
