Restrictive State Laws Making It Hard For Voters of Color

Photos: Black Voters Matter\ YouTube

Since the Janu­ary 6 insur­rec­tion, dozens of states have enacted restrict­ive voting laws. Race played a big role in where these meas­ures were intro­duced and passed, and their effects will fall espe­cially hard on voters of color.

Two laws — one in Arizona and one in Geor­gia — demon­strate how the legis­la­tion will dispro­por­tion­ately impact communit­ies of color, making it more diffi­cult for them to vote.

Before Arizona legis­lat­ors passed Senate Bill 1485 last year, registered voters could sign up to auto­mat­ic­ally receive a mail ballot for every elec­tion. Whether or not the voter actu­ally parti­cip­ated, they could still count on getting a ballot for the next contest, which made voting easier.

Under the new law, however, voters will be booted off the mail voting list if they go four years without cast­ing a mail ballot — even if the state has no reason to think they’ve moved or are other­wise ineligible.

Our analysis shows that this change will have major, racially dispar­ate effects. Latino and Black voters on the mail voting list are more than twice as likely to be at risk of removal as white voters. The changes spell prob­lems for the state’s large Native Amer­ican community too: Arizon­ans who reside on tribal lands are twice as likely to be at risk of being dropped from the mail voting list as those living else­where. While it’s import­ant to note that these voters would­n’t be “purged” — they could still vote in person or renew their request for a mail ballot — low-frequency voters might not real­ize they didn’t receive a mail ballot until it’s too late to get to a polling place.

Geor­gia presents a slightly more complex picture. There, state lawmakers passed multiple restrict­ive voting bills. In the recent primary, however, turnout increased. Some pundits declared this proof that the restrict­ive voting bills didn’t matter because people were still voting.

Not so fast.

While over­all turnout did increase, so too did the white-Black turnout gap. This year, white turnout was 6 percent­age points higher than Black turnout, far higher than in any primary in recent years.

This does­n’t prove that Geor­gi­a’s new restrict­ive bills caused the turnout gap to widen, but it does show that things are moving in the wrong direc­tion in the Peach State.

We’re less than 90 days away from the first major general elec­tion in which these new bills will be in effect around the coun­try, and activ­ists and research­ers will need to study their impacts. But the early returns suggest that the restrict­ive voting bills adop­ted in so many states will dispro­por­tion­ately impact voters of color, and those impacts may have power­ful effects on our elec­tions.

The situ­ation is another reminder of how the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which would likely have preven­ted many of these laws from taking effect, has hurt the most vulner­able voters.

Only Congress can fix this mess, and the time until the midterms is tick­ing away.

By Kevin Morris\Brennan Center