On Monday, the Department of Commerce announced that it was adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. According to the Trump Administration, this step is “necessary for the Department of Justice to protect voters.” The Justice Department had requested the change in December, on the grounds that it needed to better enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is designed to prevent violations of voting rights. It was an odd claim: in 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, called the decision “good news . . . for the South.” A raft of state voter-suppression laws targeting minority voters followed, including in Texas, which passed a voter-I.D. law that a federal judge later found to be racially discriminatory. During the Obama Administration, the federal government filed a lawsuit against the state, but last year Sessions decided to drop it. “The idea that this question is being added to the census to protect minority voting rights so that the lines can be redrawn in a fair way is just too absurd to be believed,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told me....
According to an
investigation by ProPublica, late last year Gore drafted a proposal to add the citizenship question to the census. An attorney formerly with the firm Jones Day, Gore has been
involved in Republican redistricting efforts for years in states such as Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, and New York. He has also defended Republican-backed voter-I.D. laws, including one effort, in 2012, to purge the Florida voting rolls of non-citizens, which had the effect of cancelling the registrations of some eligible voters, who were assumed to be foreign. An
analysis conducted by the Miami
Herald found that “Hispanic, Democrat, and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of non-citizens,” whereas “whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least likely to face the threat of removal.” The justification usually given for such measures is that ineligible voters might otherwise cast ballots illegally to sway the outcome of elections. Researchers and academics have categorically
refuted these claims, and several state Republican officials have even
admitted to drumming up the specter of voter fraud as a way to gain an edge over Democrats.
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