US is the shining light of democracy, or naw


http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/voting-rights-act-whats-to-come-jeff-sessions-trump

"Shelby” is Shelby County v. Holder, the June 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a key provision of 1965 Voting Rights Act used to determine which voting jurisdictions would have to pre-clear any changes to voting procedures or laws with the US Department of Justice or a federal court. Without it, nine states and parts of six others with a history of racial discrimination related to voting were allowed to make changes as they saw fit. "The election, at least for communities of color, started in June 2013,” Simpson says. "The Shelby decision is when this election began for people of color.”


In all, 14 states had new voting laws on the books for the first time in a presidential election, ranging from strict voter ID to curtailed early voting locations, according to the Brennan Center. The impact of those new laws on the outcome of the election is unclear, but Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, says that the problems they created for voters is obvious to anybody paying attention.

"Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it's fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy."
"This election, compared to the 2012 election, featured more people who had greater difficulty registering and voting thanks to a series of laws passed by Republican legislatures in the last few years,” Hasen says. The true impact of the laws still needs to be studied, but "there’s no question that some people were disenfranchised by laws that seemed unnecessary to serve any real, legitimate purpose.”

Shelby is just part of the story, Hasen adds. The current state of play for voting rights was also forged in 2008, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of voter ID in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. In that case, a group challenged a 2005 Indiana voter ID law, but the Supreme Court ruled three years later that any inconvenience to Indiana voters did not outweigh the state's interest in preventing voter fraud.

Even without detailed turnout and disenfranchisement data on the 2016 election, some things are already clear. As reported by the Nation's Ari Berman, 300,000 voters in Wisconsin lacked the recently required strict form of voter ID and voter turnout in the state was at its lowest level in 20 years. "Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it's fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy," he wrote.

Then there are the nearly 6 million people across the US barred from voting due to prior felony convictions, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform group. And a November 2016 study by the Leadership Conference Education Fund—part of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—found that at least 868 polling places had been closed in counties across seven states previously covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And that was just the voting sites for which they could find reliable data.

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bunda
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