Election Law, Justice, Politics

John Roberts Made The Most Important Pro-Trump Vote

Fine. Let's talk about black turnout, but let's do it in the only fair way.

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Chief Justice Roberts would like you to simmer down. (Nati Harnik/AP)

Chief Justice Roberts would like you to simmer down. (Nati Harnik/AP)

This was our first presidential election since Jim Crow days that took place without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.

Are you enjoying the result?

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College tally. Trump won 53% of white women. He won 72% of white people without a college degree. But it’s apparently fashionable to blame black turnout, which was off the pace set by Barack Obama, for Trump’s victory.

Black people, get used to it: we’re going to be blamed for a lot of stuff in Trumpworld.

Fine. Let’s talk about black turnout, but let’s do it in the only fair way. From the Nation:

We’ll likely never know how many people were kept from the polls by restrictions like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting, and barriers to voter registration. But at the very least this should have been a question that many more people were looking into. For example, 27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives, according to Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

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In Shelby County v. Holder, John Roberts said that the Voting Rights Act was “immensely successful… at redressing racial discrimination and integrating the voting process.” Then he gutted it like it was a stuck pig.

This is your result: a black voting population depressed just enough that it couldn’t save poor white people from themselves. John Roberts deserves as much credit for the Trump Administration as any one single person. He was the one who unleashed exactly the kind of voter suppression that could be used to turn a close election. There are many reasons why Trump won, but if your operating theory is that “not enough people voted,” then you have to give credit where credit is due.

But just looking at voter suppression as it is metastasized against the black and brown body politic misses a larger point. We make voting hard in this country, and because of that elections are always going to favor the candidate who can whip their most committed partisans into a frenzy.

We have 50 different voting regimes in this country. Very few of them have same-day registration. None of them have automatic registration. Early voting is spotty all across the country, yet national “election day” isn’t even a holiday, which means that most people have to take time away from work to do it.

Over 100 million people didn’t vote. NOT ALL OF THEM WERE BLACK PEOPLE. There isn’t a political scientist alive who thinks that if they did, Trump would be the president-elect. There probably aren’t any who think that Hillary Clinton would have even been the nominee opposing him.

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I don’t know how many of those 100 million people would vote if we made it easier for them. But I know we haven’t tried.

So sure, blame black people — despite the fact that 88% of those who showed up voted against the president-elect — if you want. But if you are really concerned about “turnout,” than your issue is with Roberts, and our election laws. Not the black and brown people who, overwhelmingly, tried to stop this from happening.

The GOP’s Attack on Voting Rights Was the Most Under-Covered Story of 2016 [The Nation]

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. Only in America could a group that voted 88% for one person be blamed for letting the other guy get elected.

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