The news

A feared former general won Indonesia’s presidential election last month, according to official results released on Wednesday that confirmed unofficial forecasts.

That candidate, Prabowo Subianto, who is now Indonesia’s defense minister, received 58.6 percent of the vote. according to the final count by the General Election Commission.

The result means that Mr Prabowo, who was on a visa blacklist by the United States for about 20 years over human rights abuses, won the election outright and avoided a runoff with the second candidate.

Although the official count is over, the process of officially declaring Mr Prabowo president-elect could be a lengthy one. His opponents – Anies Baswedan, who received 24.9 percent of the vote, and Ganjar Pranowo, who received 16.5 percent – have said they plan to challenge the result.

They accuse the outgoing president, Joko Widodo, of improperly influencing the election and claim widespread irregularities occurred during the February 14 election. They provided no evidence of election day impropriety, but said they did have evidence to prove their claims in court.

Mr. Prabowo’s representatives reject these claims, noting that almost every poll before the election showed him as the frontrunner.

Why it matters

For many observers and critics, the elections have tarnished Indonesia’s hard-won reputation as a vibrant democracy.

At the heart of their dissatisfaction are Mr Joko’s actions before the election and the way he used state resources to support Mr Prabowo, whom he defeated in the previous two elections. Mr. Joko exerted his influence, they say, on a court that changed a law allowing his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to run as Mr. Prabowo’s running mate. Then, they say, Mr. Joko violated norms by campaigning for the duo and ordering social benefits that helped their candidacy.

“There was no level playing field, which is fundamental to elections,” said Rohana Hettiarachchi, president of the Asian Network for Free Elections, an alliance of independent election watchdogs.

Mr Joko has denied the allegations of wrongdoing and said presidents are allowed to campaign and take sides as long as they do not use state facilities. When he made these comments, Mr Prabowo was at his side.

Mr. Prabowo’s record has long upset many in the country. He was dismissed from the army after being found responsible for the kidnapping of student activists; he has questioned the need for democracy; and he is known for his violent temper and erratic behavior. During the campaign, Mr Prabowo emphasized his commitment to democracy.

What’s next

Legal experts say Mr Ganjar and Mr Anies are unlikely to have any success in court if they go ahead with their plan to seek legal intervention. The Constitutional Court, which hears such cases, has never ruled in favor of claimants challenging election results. For example, it rejected Mr Prabowo’s claims in 2019, when he lost the election to Mr Joko.

Barring any legal setbacks, Mr Prabowo is expected to be formally declared president-elect in the coming weeks. He will take office after Mr Joko’s term ends in October.

Dorie Ann Ladner, a largely unsung heroine on the frontlines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s South, a crusade that shamed the nation and abolished some of the last vestiges of legal segregation, died Monday in Washington. She was 81.

She died in a hospital of complications from Covid-19, bronchial obstruction and colitis, said her older sister and fellow civil rights activist Joyce Ladner, who called her a lifelong defender of “the underdog and the dispossessed.”

Born and raised in racially segregated Mississippi by a mother who taught her not to joke, Ms. Ladner joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager; left university three times to organize voter registration campaigns and promote integration; occasionally picked up a gun, as some of her prominent colleagues were shot or blown up; befriended the movement’s most celebrated figures; and participated in virtually every major civil rights march of the decade.

“The movement was something I wanted to do,” she said The Southern Quarterly in 2014. “It was pulling at me, pulling at me, so I followed my conscience.”

“The line was drawn in the sand for blacks and for whites,” she said in an interview for the PBS documentary series “American experiencethe same year. ‘And would I stay on the other side of the line forever? No. I decided to cross that line. I jumped over that line and started fighting.”

Dorie Ann Ladner was born June 28, 1942 in Hattiesburg, Miss. Her ancestors included Native Americans and, five generations earlier, a white landowner, but she identified as black. Her father, Eunice Ladner, was a dry cleaner whose marriage to her mother, Annie (Woullard) Ladner, ended in divorce when she was a toddler. Her mother, who managed the house, later married William Perryman, a mechanic.

Dorie participated in her first spontaneous protest when she was twelve: when a white grocery store clerk in her Palmers Crossing neighborhood inappropriately touched her buttocks, she hit him with a bag of donuts.

“Mother started training us not to let anyone abuse or mistreat us, and to always look white people in the eye when you talk to them,” Ms. Ladner recalled in the Southern Quarterly interview. “’Never look down, never look back.’”

Dorie and Joyce joined the NAACP in high school, and after graduating in the same class despite their age difference – with Joyce as salutatorian and Dorie as valedictorian – Dorie enrolled at what was then Jackson State College in Jackson, Miss. .

She was expelled after participating in a prayer vigil for students organizing a civil rights protest at Tougaloo College, which, like Jackson, is a historically black institution. The students had been arrested after staging a sit-in at the all-white public library in Jackson.

She later transferred to Tougaloo, where she quit three times to work as a civil rights organizer, but ultimately graduated in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in history. After moving to Washington in 1974, she earned a master’s degree from Howard University’s School of Social Work and became an emergency room social worker at the District of Columbia General Hospital, which closed in 2001.

While at Tougaloo, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, placing herself at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Prompted by the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a black teenager barely a year older than she was at the time, she was also shocked by the murders of colleagues in the civil rights movement, including Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer.

“The murder of Emmett Till left a strong impression on me,” she said later in life. “I said, ‘If they did it to him, they’ll do it to me.'”

During her breaks in college, Ms. Ladner was serenaded by Bob Dylan at the New York apartment where she helped plan the 1963 March on Washington. He was said to be in love with her and had alluded to her in his song “Outlaw Blues”: I got a woman in Jackson / I’m not gonna say her name / She’s a brown-skinned woman, but I / love her just the same.

Ms. Ladner also has the Council of Federated Organizations, a network of civil rights groups; was arrested in Jackson for trying to integrate a Woolworth lunch counter; narrowly escaped a bomb accidentally placed next to where she was staying in Natchez while running an SNCC project; organized voter registration drives, including the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964, and worked with Fannie Lou Hamer, who was summarily evicted from her plantation home for registering; and was an organizer of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s all-white Democratic delegates to the party’s 1964 national convention.

In 1971 she married Hailu Churnet; their marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her sister Joyce, a professor of sociology who served as interim president of Howard University from 1994 to 1995, she is survived by her daughter, Yodit Churnet; another sister, Billie Collins; a brother, Harvey Garrett; two stepsisters, Willa Perryman Tate and Hazel Perryman Mimbs; two stepbrothers, Freddie and Archie Perryman; and a grandson. Another of her stepbrothers, Tommy Perryman, died before her.

Mr. Ladner often marveled that she was still a teenager when she convinced poor, vulnerable black people to risk their lives for principles she passionately proclaimed and believed they had an obligation to defend.

“I’ve been thinking a lot,” she said an interview with The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in 2008: “Would I follow a 19-year-old student myself?”

“But we had a message, and their ancestors had moved on, and we were the messengers who brought them the message that had been passed on that they were waiting for,” she added. “Spiritually, that’s the only way I can describe it. Because we had nothing but ourselves, and we lived in their houses and lived in community, and ate what they ate.

“We were poor ourselves,” Ms. Ladner said. “We had nothing. We didn’t have any big shiny cars, and we just had a message, and the message was one of liberation for all of us.”

David B. Mixner, a political strategist who played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the uphill battle for gay rights, and whose decades of influence with Bill Clinton spanned both eras, died Monday at his home in Midtown Manhattan. He was 77.

The cause was complications from the prolonged Covid-19 crisis, said Steven Guy, a close friend.

Mr. Mixner, born three days after Mr. Clinton and raised in similar rural hardships, met the future president when they were in their early 20s. He later arranged for Clinton to deliver the first public speech by a major presidential candidate to a gay and lesbian audience in 1992.

His political acumen was such that he convinced California’s leading conservative, Ronald Reagan, to oppose a 1978 state initiative to ban gay teachers. The measure’s defeat was the most important victory for gay rights in the country at the time.

“When I met him when he was young,” Mr. Clinton said of Mr. Mixner in 1999, addressing an LGBTQ group, “I thought I had never met anyone whose heart burned with the fire of social justice that was so strong.”

The son of a farm worker in southern New Jersey, Mr. Mixner dropped out of college to work as a political organizer, and in the late 1960s he seemed to be everywhere, including as part of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign and as presenter. at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year. He was one of four national co-chairs of the Moratorium to End the Vietnam War, a series of major protests in the fall of 1969.

Mr. Clinton met Mr. Mixner that year at a retreat for moratorium supporters on Martha’s Vineyard. The two men bonded over a walk on the beach, in part because of their humble backgrounds, which set them apart from the upper-middle-class Ivy League students who played a dominant role in the anti-war movement.

Mr. Clinton, an Arkansas native and a 23-year-old Rhodes Scholar then studying at Oxford, slept on Mr. Mixner’s couch when he visited the moratorium offices in Washington. He volunteered to help with a satellite protest at the U.S. Embassy in London. Mr. Mixner later visited him in Oxford, where he lay on the floor of a house Mr. Clinton was renting.

A Democratic insider at a time when almost all homosexuals were closeted in politics, the 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Mixner dreamed of a career in the public sector but was convinced that his “terrible secret” of homosexuality wouldn’t allow it. he wrote in a memoir, “Stranger Among Friends” (1996).

So he largely played behind-the-scenes roles. In the 1970s he moved to Los Angeles, where he brought his organizational and strategic expertise to California politics. He worked on campaigns for Harvey Milk, the first openly gay candidate elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and for anti-war activist Tom Hayden. He was the campaign manager for Tom Bradley’s successful bid for re-election as mayor of Los Angeles in 1977.

While still largely closeted, Mr. Mixner in 1976 helped found the Los Angeles Municipal Election Commission, the nation’s first gay and lesbian political action committee. Politicians at the time often returned money from openly gay donors.

Two years later, California Republicans, hoping to exploit a backlash against the rising gay rights movement, placed Proposition 6 on the ballot: a proposal to ban gay men and lesbians from working in public schools.

The measure, also known as the Briggs Initiative (named after its sponsor, Senator John Briggs), received broad support in the polls. Mr. Mixner set out to oppose it. In a letter to friends, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, he announced that he was gay and asked for donations to fight the proposal.

It was Mr. Mixner who crafted an argument to convince Mr. Reagan to oppose Prop 6, according to the book “Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” ​​by reporters Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney from The New York Times.

As a former Republican governor of California, Mr. Reagan prepared to run for president as an anti-government conservative. At a meeting, Mr. Mixner made it clear that the initiative was not about gay rights at all; it was, he said, a matter of government interference and privacy and would open the door for disgruntled students to blackmail their teachers.

Mr. Reagan agreed and publicly expressed his opposition to Proposition 6. Overnight, public opinion turned. The initiative was convincingly defeated.

The 1980s and early 1990s, the height of the AIDS epidemic, claimed many leaders of the gay rights movement, including Mr. Mixner’s romantic and professional partner, Peter Scott, who died in 1989. After years of inaction on AIDS by the White Houses of Mr. Reagan and his successor, George HW Bush, there was cautious hope among LGBTQ activists for the 1992 presidential election. Most gay and lesbian leaders favored Paul Tsongas, a liberal former U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But Mr. Mixner’s old friend, Mr. Clinton, asked him to raise money on his behalf and build support in the gay community.

At first, Mr. Mixner hesitated. “I said, ‘Bill, I’ve lost more than 180 friends to AIDS,’” he told The New York Times in 1992. “Before I can get behind this campaign, I need to know where you stand on this, where you stand on AIDS and our fight for our freedom.’”

A key issue for Mr. Mixner was ending the ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military. In a interview in 2023, he told Time magazine that he agreed to help Mr. Clinton on the condition that he lift the ban.

In May 1992, Mr. Mixner introduced Mr. Clinton to 500 gay donors at a fundraiser in Los Angeles. To loud applause, Mr. Clinton said: “What I came here today to tell you in simple terms is: I have a vision and you are part of it.” He reiterated that he would end discrimination in the military based on sexual orientation.

But once in power, Clinton faced fierce opposition to that plan. He compromised with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which banned the harassment of closeted gay soldiers while banning openly gay people from serving.

Mr. Mixner felt betrayed and expressed his anger on the ABC News program “Nightline.” In his memoirs he describes how he was ostracized by the Clinton administration because of his criticism.

In July 1993, Mr. Mixner helped lead a protest against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” outside the White House, where his arrest as a known “friend of Bill” received news media coverage.

He and Mr. Clinton eventually healed the rift. During a meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Clinton jokingly said he had considered handing him a pair of handcuffs from his arrest, Mr. Mixner recalled in his book. (Congress lifted the military ban on gay men and women in 2011.)

David Benjamin Mixner was born on August 16, 1946 in Salem County, NJ, the youngest of three children. His father, Ben, worked long hours on a commercial farm growing and packaging frozen vegetables. His mother, Mary (Grove) Mixner, was a bookkeeper for a John Deere tractor dealer.

Mr. Mixner is survived by a brother, Melvin.

In the fall of 1964, Mr. Mixner arrived at Arizona State University as a freshman and became involved in political activism. He organized students to support a strike by local sanitation workers. He transferred to the University of Maryland to be near the center of the anti-war movement in Washington, and volunteered as an organizer of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, where demonstrators chanted, “Hell no, we won.” t go!” to Vietnam to fight.

He dropped out of college soon afterward and became a $320-a-month organizer for Mr. McCarthy’s presidential campaign.

After Clinton’s presidency, Mr. Mixner supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. In 2009, he helped lead a march on Washington for equal rights, speaking alongside Lady Gaga and Cynthia Nixon.

When he received an award from the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD in 2008, he recalled his life trajectory in an interview with the news website SFGateexpressing pride in his political activism, but also striking a sad tone about the toll of AIDS on his generation of gay men.

“All my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass on stories to the next generation,” he said. “We have lost a whole generation of storytellers.”

After former President Donald J. Trump seemed to suggest he was open to cutting federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, President Biden immediately seized on the comments, saying, “Not on my watch.”

As he prepares for a general election rematch against Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden has been keen to emphasize his pledge not to touch Social Security or Medicare. He has argued that Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, would take away those benefits. But in a sign of the issue’s political potential, Trump’s campaign quickly tried to make clear that Americans who rely on the programs have nothing to worry about.

In an interview that aired on CNBC on MondayAsked whether he had changed his position on changing those programs to rein in the national debt, Mr. Trump said there is “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of spending cuts and also in terms of terms of the theft and poor management of rights, massively poor management of rights.”

But he also seemed to disagree with the premise of the question, which stated that something should be done about the programs’ impact on the national debt.

“So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement,” Trump said.

Still, the White House responded quickly.

“Cutting the Medicare and Social Security benefits that Americans have paid to earn throughout their lives, only to make room for even more unaffordable, trickle-down tax breaks for the super-rich, is just plain backwards,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates . said.

Mr. Trump’s campaign wasted no time in trying to clarify his comments. Posts on said he wanted to freeze federal spending, including social security.

“President Trump made good on his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare in his first term, and President Trump will continue to vigorously protect Social Security and Medicare in his second term,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

Mr. Trump has had to adjust his position on rights reforms in the past. In 2020, as president, he told an interviewer that “at some point” he would consider cutting entitlement programs, prompting Democrats to back off on the comments. The president quickly said, “The Democrats are going to destroy your Social Security. I have left it completely alone, as promised, and will save it!

During his time in office, Trump’s budget proposals sought to undermine the social safety net by calling for cuts to Medicaid and other programs. He largely avoided proposing major cuts to the Social Security retirement program or Medicare, although he did call for some cuts that experts said would not have had a significant effect on benefits. (The changes were not passed by Congress.)

During the Republican primaries, Trump attacked his opponents, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, by suggesting they would cut benefits.

Among the hundreds of guests who will fill the House chamber Thursday evening — each invited to telegraph different political messages — will be dozens of Democratic-invited reproductive rights advocates who want to center access to abortion and fertility treatments. election year.

Twenty-eight Democrats in the House of Representatives and at least seven in the Senate chose their guests because of their reproductive health experiences or advocacy backgrounds. They include the first person born in the United States through in vitro fertilization, women who relied on IVF to become pregnant, abortion providers and women who were denied abortion by state bans after learning of fatal fetal abnormalities or developing conditions that threatened their health and fertility. .

It’s all part of an effort by Democrats to emphasize their support for reproductive rights while taking advantage of the tough restrictions imposed by Republican-led states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s also a way for them to highlight how Republicans — many of whom have supported abortion bans — have proven their support the concept of fetal personality – have endorsed policies that could jeopardize access to abortion and fertility treatments.

“It is the fight of our lives. We have Republicans – they want to force women to stay pregnant, or prevent women from getting pregnant,” said Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida, who represents Dr. Cherise Felix, a gynecologist who fled Tennessee’s abortion ban to practice at a Planned Parenthood in West Palm Beach. “The threat from Donald Trump is real. It is because of him that Roe v. Wade was overturned, and we know Joe Biden will be a fighter for us.”

After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos should be considered children, a decision that threatened access to IVF in the state, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, invited Elizabeth Carr – the first American to laboratory was conceived. Mrs. Carr was born in 1981 in Norfolk, Virginia. (Alabama lawmakers passed a law Wednesday to protect IVF providers from criminal and civil liability.)

“It is more important than ever that we work to protect access to IVF services across the country,” Mr Kaine said in a statement.

Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, invited Amanda Zurawski, a prosecutor in a lawsuit against Texas abortion ban, who was only allowed to undergo the procedure after going into septic shock when her waters broke at 18 weeks of pregnancy. On Thursday, Ms. Zurawski said she turned to IVF to start a family after the infection she contracted during her previous pregnancy compromised her fertility, and that she moved her frozen embryos abroad after the ruling in Alabama, fearing a similar restriction could come into effect. down in Texas.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, Kayla Smith invited, who spent thousands of dollars traveling there for an abortion in 2022 after she was denied one in Idaho after learning her baby — which she insisted Thursday was “highly sought after” — had fatal defects. Ms. Smith is a plaintiff in one lawsuit filed in September challenging Idaho’s abortion ban.

Ms. Murray said it is imperative that Democrats “shine a light on the horrific consequences of Republican abortion bans, which have taken away a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions.”

Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation codify federal abortion rights and to protect access to IVF., but faced Republican opposition. Last week, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, blocked the rapid passage of a bill to protect access to fertility treatments.

“It’s very clear who stands up for women and who trusts women to make decisions about their own bodies and their own health care – it’s Democrats,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, who represents Dr. Amanda Adeleye, a reproductive endocrinologist, invited. “So my reminder to voters is: remember who is looking out for your reproductive rights. They are certainly not Republicans.”

The Alabama Legislature is expected to pass legislation Wednesday that would allow fertility clinics in the state to reopen without the specter of crippling lawsuits.

But the measure, which was hastily written and expected to pass by a huge bipartisan margin, does not address the legal question that has led to clinic closures and set off a stormy, politically charged national debate : or embryos frozen and stored for possible future implantation have the legal status of humans.

The Alabama Supreme Court made such a ruling last month, in the context of a claim against a mobile clinic brought by three couples whose frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed. The court ruled that these embryos should be considered human under Alabama law and that the couples were entitled to damages for the wrongful death of a child.

Legal experts said the bill, which Gov. Kay Ivey has indicated she will sign, would be the first in the nation to create a legal moat around embryos, blocking lawsuits or prosecutions if they are damaged or destroyed.

But while the measure will likely bring enormous relief to infertility patients whose treatments were abruptly suspended, it will do so in exchange for limiting their ability to sue when embryo mishaps occur. Such restrictions in an area of ​​medicine with limited regulatory oversight could make the new law vulnerable to legal challenges, the experts said.

Here you will find answers to some important questions:

What does the measure do?

It creates two levels of legal immunity. If embryos are damaged or destroyed, direct providers of fertility services, including doctors and clinics, cannot be sued or prosecuted.

Others who handle frozen embryos, including shippers, cryobanks and manufacturers of devices such as storage tanks, have more limited protection, but it is still significant. Patients can sue them for damaged or destroyed embryos, but the only compensation they can receive is reimbursement for costs associated with the affected IVF cycle.

Does the law benefit patients beyond allowing clinics to reopen?

It may have some advantages. The legal shield protecting providers of fertility services also includes individuals who “receive services,” which appears to extend to patients undergoing IVF

Patients in Alabama will have “a cone around how they do IVF and how they treat their embryos,” including donating frozen embryos to medical research, throwing them away, or choosing not to be implanted with embryos with genetic abnormalities, said Barbara Collurathe president of Resolve, a national group representing infertility patients.

That could be particularly important given the recent state Supreme Court ruling.

“Until now, no state has ever declared embryos human. And once you declare that they are human beings, much more compensation becomes available,” he said Benjamin McMichael, an associate professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, specializing in healthcare and tort law. “So this is the first time we have needed such a bill, because we have always treated embryos as property at best.”

Does the measure prevent a patient from suing a fertility provider for negligence?

The law does not cover everyday medical malpractice. If an infertility patient has a dangerous ectopic pregnancy because a doctor accidentally implanted an embryo in her fallopian tube, she can still sue for negligence, Mr. McMichael said. But among her damages, he said, she cannot claim the destroyed embryo.

“The bill does not establish liability or provide an opportunity for injured parties to hold other people liable,” he said. “It just gives immunity.”

Other legal experts said the lines drawn by the legislature were open to question. Judith There, the dean of Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law and an expert in reproductive law, gave the example of an embryologist who switches or otherwise mishandles embryos.

“This bill says there is no recourse for patients for reproductive negligence,” she said. “I don’t think that was the intent, but the plain language of the statute would certainly produce such a result.”

Until now, she said, patients haven’t always won such cases, “but here they don’t even have the option to file a claim.”

The measure is very much a doctor protection bill, she added. “I’m not condemning that, but it doesn’t really meet the needs of patients and in fact seems to deprive them of their rights,” she said.

To the extent that the threat of legal consequences can modulate behavior, she says, “this bill certainly gives providers more permission to worry less about caution because there is no liability at stake.”

Are the wrongful death cases that led to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling now moot?

No, these things can continue. The new legislation exempts all embryo-related lawsuits that are currently being litigated. However, if patients have not yet filed a claim based on the destruction of their embryos, they will not be allowed to file one once the bill is passed.

Does this legislation do anything to resolve the personality controversy?

No. It completely sidesteps the question of whether a frozen embryo is a person. That ruling, at least in the context of a wrongful death claim, still stands in Alabama. Instead of tackling the issue, which has caused a political storm across the country, lawmakers are “trying to cut through the liability side of it and come up with some very complex and counterintuitive measures,” Ms Daar said.

Resolve’s Ms Collura said the proposal solves an immediate problem but leaves the bigger issue hanging. “The status of embryos in Alabama is that they are persons. But what is the mechanism by which clinics can open and patients can receive care?” she said. “Is this the best way? No. Will it open clinics? Yes. Does it create other unintended consequences? Yes.”

Emily Cochrane reporting contributed.

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.”