8 Scientific American, April 2022
SCIENCE AGENDA
OPINION AND ANALYSIS FROM
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S BOARD OF EDITORS
Illustration by Martin GeeIn 2021 Republican legislatures in 19 states passed 34 laws that
restricted access to voting in more than a dozen different ways. And
those are just the bills that succeeded; hundreds of other provisions,
some still under consideration, were introduced nationwide.
“The momentum around this legislation continues,” the Bren-
nan Center for Justice, which tracks these efforts, wrote on its Web
site. At least 165 restrictive voting bills were already on the dock-
et for this year by mid-January. “These early indicators—coupled
with the ongoing mobilization around the Big Lie (the same false
rhetoric about voter fraud that drove [last] year’s unprecedented
wave of vote suppression bills)—suggest that efforts to restrict and
undermine the vote will continue to be a serious threat in 2022.”
The GOP has justified voting restrictions by saying that it is
safeguarding elections against fraud and that certain protections
against electoral bias are no longer necessary. Evidence belies this
ploy to seize power by disenfranchising voters, especially mi -
norities, who tend to vote Democratic. Voter fraud is exceedingly
rare in the U.S. and hasn’t increased since the 1965 Voting Rights
Act. But minority suffrage has grown tremendously, and the ben-
efits of federal oversight have persisted. Alarmed by this trend,
conservative legislators and jurists began chipping away at codi-
fied voting rights decades ago. They stand to gain even more
ground during this year’s midterm elections if left unchecked.
While odious lies about a stolen election propelled the current
wave of restrictions, the path that led to this point was laid back
in 2013. In the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court
dismantled a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act called “preclear-
ance,” which required jurisdictions with a history of discrimina-
tion to get Justice Department or federal court approval for any
planned changes to electoral rules. Arguing that patterns of dis-
crimination had changed, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the
majority opinion that Congress should not use “a formula based
on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day.”
Desmond Ang, an expert in public policy and race at Harvard
University, disagrees, saying that preclearance is as essential to civ-
il rights today as it ever has been. According to an analysis he pub-
lished in 2019, that critical provision of the Voting Rights Act alone
“continued to bolster enfranchisement over four decades later,” es-
pecially among minorities. So enduring were the benefits, he wrote,
that “broad preventative oversight encompassing the universe of
potential voting changes may be the most effective means of curb-
ing discrimination in settings like the United States, where elec-
toral rulemaking is highly decentralized and opaque.”
In a similar vein, sociologists Nicholas Pedriana and Robin
Stryker concluded in a 2017 comparative analysis that of three sem-
inal civil rights laws passed in the 1960s—the Voting Rights Act,
the Fair Housing Act and the equal employment opportunity pro-
visions of the Civil Rights Act—the Voting Rights Act was the most
successful in promoting equality. Its success depended largely on
what the researchers called group-centered effects, which focus on
systemic disadvantage rather than individual harm, discriminato-
ry consequences rather than intent, and remedial group results
rather than justice for individual victims or wrongdoers. Remov-
ing that statutory framework produces the opposite effect, Stryk-
er says: highly effective, systematic suppression of minority votes.
In January the Democrats’ best efforts to date to repel the cur-
rent onslaught of voting restrictions—the Freedom to Vote Act and
the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—failed in the
Senate. The former would have established nationwide standards
for ballot access and hindered other forms of electoral prejudice
such as gerrymandering. The latter would have reversed the 2013
Supreme Court ruling on preclearance as well as another one last
year, which made it harder to challenge electoral rules in court on
the grounds of discrimination. The bills contained the type of
broad-based, preventive strategies that have been so effective at
fostering racial equality at the very core of our democratic system.
Ang and Stryker lamented their demise and conceded that it’s dif-
ficult not to despair in the face of intense political polarization.
For decades the Voting Rights Act enjoyed bipartisan support.
No longer. Yet we must restore and expand federal oversight and ju-
risdiction of biased electoral rules. Until then, it is incumbent on so-
cial justice movements and everyone who cares about the most fun-
damental of democratic rights to keep the pressure on. As sociolo-
gist Aldon Morris wrote for us in February 2021, “when President
Lyndon B. Johnson formally ended the Jim Crow era by signing the
Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he did
so because massive protests raging in the streets had forced it.”JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
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Voting Rights
They boost suffrage, not fraud
By the Editors