INSTITUTE INDEX: A turning point in the fight against voter suppression?

By Sue Sturgis / August 4, 2016

Photo from the 2016 Moral March in Raleigh, North Carolina, by Susan Melkisethian via Flickr.

Date on which a federal appeals court panel struck down North Carolina's restrictive new voting law, finding that provisions ranging from photo ID requirements to rollbacks of early voting deliberately "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision": 7/29/2016

Rank of the North Carolina law among the biggest rollbacks of voting rights since the 1965 Voting Rights Act: 1

In the past two weeks, number of major decisions issued by the courts striking down Republican-engineered voting restrictions passed following the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that effectively ended federal preclearance requirements under the Voting Rights Act for states with a history of voter discrimination: 6

Number of states affected by these recent court rulings: 6

Of those six states, number in the South: 2

Date on which a federal appeals court ruled that Texas' voter ID law, one of the nation's strictest, violated the Voting Rights Act and had to be fixed before the November election: 7/20/2016

Total number of registered Texas voters — disproportionately black and Hispanic — who lack IDs required to vote under the overturned version of the law: 608,000

According to a tentative deal reached this week to soften the law by expanding the number of acceptable kinds of IDs, amount Texas will allot for voter outreach efforts: $2.5 million

If the trial court where the law was sent back to finds Texas passed it with racially discriminatory intent, number of years that it could put the state back under federal preclearance requirements: 10

Number of states where litigation that could impact voting access is still underway: 4

Of those states, number in the South: 3*

Even with the recent court decisions, number of states that will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election: 15

Of those states, number in the South: 7**

Number of years in a row that state bills to expand ballot access have outpaced those that would restrict voting, both in terms of introduction and passage: 4

* Alabama, Georgia and Virginia.
** Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

(Click on figure to go to source.)

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