3/4/20
A number of voters in Texas, many of them black and brown, waited in huge lines to vote in the Lone Star State's Democratic primary on Super Tuesday, reminding the nation of the high cost of the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision to repeal voting rights enforcement. The high court's decision to end the pre-clearance requirement that mandated that states under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (such as Texas) submit plans to alter voter access to the Justice Department has produced utter chaos, especially in communities dominated by people of color. At Texas Southern University in Houston, voting lines wrapped around buildings with people standing in line for more than five hours to cast their ballots, long after the polls had officially closed. A similar story played out in San Marcos, Texas, at the LBJ Student Center at Texas State University. There, massive lines of patiently waiting students and citizens curled through parts of the surrounding neighborhood and campus to vote. At the University of Texas in Austin, where I teach, some students had to leave the line after waiting over an hour and a half to vote. These long lines to some extent indicate unexpectedly high voter turnout -- but they also evoke statewide efforts at voter suppression that have gone unabated since 2013. In Texas, at least 750 polling places have been closed since then, forcing many predominantly black and brown people to travel longer distances to exercise their citizenship rights.
A report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights notes that Texas, now no longer subject to Justice Department pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act, leads the nation in polling place closures. That report's authors write that "closing polling places has a cascading effect, leading to long lines at other polling places, transportation hurdles, denial of language assistance and other forms of in-person help, and mass confusion about where eligible voters may cast their ballot. The consequences of voter suppression in Texas are especially important this year for at least two reasons. First, it is a national presidential election year, one in which officials are anticipating unprecedented interest and voter turnout across the state. Super Tuesday's long lines offer a snapshot of what to expect this November -- unless dramatic remedial efforts happen statewide before the general election. The tragedy of modern-day voter suppression is that it echoes the very same institutional and political mechanisms designed to deny the black vote after Reconstruction. The removal or displacement of polling locations, the proliferation of broken, missing or faulty machines, and long lines that stretch for blocks and last for hours into the night, discourage people from voting and being active citizens. Perhaps the silver lining in these events is that Texas has earned national visibility as a state. The whole country has now seen that, contrary to its best image of itself, Texas makes it extremely difficult for some of its residents to vote, a contemporary reality that reflects some of Selma's dark legacy -- a historical blight many of us thought we'd long overcome.
