voting rights

Ballot suppression battle rages on

It has become a truth of modern politics that Republican electoral prospects go up as the number of voters goes down. That helps explain conservatives' intensifying efforts to make it harder to vote or to eliminate large numbers of people from political representation.

On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected one of the more extreme attempts — a lawsuit from Texas that aimed to reverse long-standing practice and require that only eligible voters be counted in the drawing of state legislative districts.

Texas, like virtually everywhere else, applies the court's "one person, one vote" rule by counting all people living in a district, regardless of whether they can vote. The legal challenge to that practical approach came from white conservatives living in Republican-leaning rural areas. They said this diminished their political power and increased the political power of Texas' urban areas, where more minorities — particularly Latinos, who are disproportionately not citizens — tend to live.

In Evenwel vs. Abbott, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, which voted 8-0, dismissed the plaintiffs' argument. "As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote," Ginsburg wrote.

This suit was an easy one for the justices to toss out, but Republican lawmakers around the country already have enjoyed plenty of success erecting obstacles between the ballot box and the most vulnerable voters.

A good example comes from Wisconsin, which held its presidential primaries on Tuesday. In 2011, a Republican-controlled statehouse passed, and Gov. Scott Walker signed, the state's voter-identification bill, which requires that prospective voters present a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver's license or passport.

The problem, documented again and again and again, is that voter-ID laws are a destructive solution to a nonexistent problem. If there were any doubts about the bad faith of these laws, consider this: The Wisconsin law requires the state to educate voters about acceptable forms of ID and how to secure them — a particularly important public service for the roughly 300,000 state residents estimated not to have the proper ID. But despite requests from the state's nonpartisan Government Accountability Board for $300,000 to $500,000 for that effort, the Legislature provided no funding. Instead, Walker signed a bill in December to dismantle the board.

Voting is a fundamental constitutional right, and politicians should be fighting to protect and expand it no matter their political affiliation. In an op-ed column in the New York Times last week, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, a 19-term Republican, made the case against more barriers to voting. "Ensuring that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without fear, deterrence and prejudice is a basic American right," he wrote. "I would rather lose my job than suppress votes to keep it." It's a shame, but not a surprise, that more of Sensenbrenner's colleagues don't agree.

FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE NEW YORK TIMES