John Roberts’s mission accomplished

Shelby County has achieved its objective:

The turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in the U.S. is growing fastest in jurisdictions that were stripped of a federal civil rights-era voting protection a decade ago, according to a new study.

The protections in Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act required some states and localities with a history of voting discrimination to obtain federal approval before they could make any changes to their voting laws or procedures.

It most recently covered nine states, most of them in the South, as well as certain counties and towns in a handful of other states.

In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively gutted Section 5 in Shelby County v. Holder — clearing the way for states to pass laws for measures like redistricting, changing poll locations and adding restrictive voter ID requirements without federal review.

A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that advocates for expanded voting access, measured the impact of the Shelby County decision between 2012 and 2022.

The researchers looked at nearly a billion voter records and compared the rate at which white and nonwhite Americans vote in elections. The study refers to the difference between white voters and other groups as the “turnout gap.”

The gap can be wide: In three elections from 2018 to 2022, 43% of eligible white voters cast their ballots every time, while that figure for Black voters was 27%, 21% for Asian American voters and 19% for Hispanic voters, according to the Pew Research Center.

Understanding the effect of any voting law can be difficult because a number of factors can alter turnout, including how competitive the election is and who’s on the ballot.

And across the U.S., the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters is increasing for various reasons.

But the think tank found that the turnout gap was growing faster in places formerly covered under Section 5 and that it was growing fastest between white and Black voters in those areas.

It’s true that given increasing educational polarization that vote suppression may help Republicans less than its architects assumed at the time. My quaint view is that both vote suppression and lawless Supreme Court decisions are bad irrespective of their short-term partisan valence.