The racial turnout gap has widened due to a weakened voting rights law, research shows

When the Supreme Court struck down a core part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. argued. that some of the law’s protections against racial discrimination were no longer necessary.

He wrote that the once troubling turnout gap between white and black voters in areas with a history of electoral discrimination had largely disappeared, and that “the conditions that originally justified civil rights law’s attention to these places, especially in the South, existed not anymore.

But a new, yearlong study from the Brennan Center for Justicea nonpartisan think tank focused on democracy and voting rights issues suggests otherwise.

Before the decision, counties with a history of racial discrimination in elections had to get permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures. This was known as “preclearance” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and it was the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that effectively overturned this part of the law.

Since that decision, the gap in turnout rates between white and nonwhite voters has grown “nearly twice as fast in previously covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the country with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles,” Brennan’s study found .

The “racial turnout gap” refers to the difference in the percentage of eligible white and non-white voters who voted in a given election. This gap is closely watched by voting rights groups and civil rights leaders as an indication of potentially harmful laws or procedures that could have oppressive effects on communities of color.

According to the group’s report, the turnout gap between black and white voters in former Section 5 counties has grown by 11 percentage points between 2012 and 2022 since the Shelby decision. The study drew on nearly a billion voter records to estimate that if the decision never happened, the white-black turnout gap would have nevertheless increased, but by only six percentage points.

While that difference may seem small, the study’s authors argue that such differences are “potentially enormous” in modern politics: Since 2012, at least 62 elections for the Senate, governor and president in states with Section 5 counties have been decided by fewer than five percentage points.

“From a moral perspective, it obviously matters, but it also matters because the margins are significant, especially given the close elections across the country,” said Kareem Crayton, senior director of voting rights and representation at the Brennan Center.

After the Shelby decision, state lawmakers across the country passed a series of new voting restrictions, including new voter ID laws, and 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 motivating factors like close races or polarizing candidates, making it an inaccurate metric to measure the impact of those laws, many argue. And the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision was far greater than just new voting laws; Any number of voting procedures, such as changing polling places or purging voter rolls, were no longer subject to federal approval.

“Do we know that Shelby County has changed its election laws? Yes,” said Bernard Fraga, professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. “What impact does that have on turnout? Turnout is downstream, is affected by election laws, is affected by people’s response to election laws, how competitive elections are – a number of other factors that make it difficult to look at turnout and say that we now have the impact of the Shelby can assess the province’s decision.”

Most attempts to quantify the racial turnout gap rely on statistics such as censuses and political surveys such as exit polls. The Brennan Center study relied on those voter files — detailed data on voters’ histories and habits — from every federal election since 2008 to assess the gap, claiming that an analysis of that data provides a more complete picture.

The authors noted that statistical limitations prevented them from estimating a total number of votes lost as a result of the Shelby decision.

More broadly, the report’s findings support what voting rights activists and experts say is an alarming turning point in the country’s broader democratic foundations. After the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, nonwhite voter participation grew for decades. That is no longer the case.

The survey shows that there is a significant racial turnout gap across the country, outside of counties previously under Section 5. In the 2020 election, 9.3 million more people would have voted if non-white voters had participated at the same rate as white voters. In the 2022 midterm elections, that total would have been 13.9 million ballots.

The gap persisted between education and income lines. Although turnout is declining across racial and ethnic lines in lower-income communities, poorer white voters are still more likely to turn out than their non-white peers, according to the study.

The widening turnout gap is a “major problem,” said Jake Grumbach, a policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “The democratic institutions in the US have become healthier since 1965. And this is the first time the trend has actually reversed in the post-civil rights era. And so I think that’s the damaging point.”

There are many other factors that contribute to election turnout. Still, the total number of “missing” votes is most likely large, the study says.

“By the 2022 midterm elections, the Shelby County Effect cost hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters of color in previously covered counties in each federal general election,” Mr. Crayton said. “And we know that even a fraction of that number can make a difference in elections or in awarding electoral votes to a state.”