The U.S. Supreme Court, in a jarring ruling recently, literally gutted the voting rights act, which had protected minority voters in many southern districts. Several organizations have been championing a Rhode Island version that would establish procedures to prevent discrimination in the voting process.
In April, the bill was held for further study, although some of the organizations remain hopeful of its passage, and some legislators have agreed the bill is still under consideration, with about a week left to the current legislative session.
Common Cause Rhode Island is among the bill’s chief supporters.
WhatsUpNewp recently sat down with John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, to talk about the Voting Rights Act, campaign finances, ethics and more. We’ll explore a number of these issues in a series of articles we’ll publish over the next few days. Today, we begin with voting rights:
WUN: I wanted to talk about this Voting Rights Act that you’re shepherding through the legislature.
MARION: People might be familiar. It’s been in the news lately. The Voting Rights Act, as we think of it, was a law by Congress in 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed. It came after the, march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and where John Lewis and other protesters were beaten. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, at its heart, is about enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that were passed after the Civil War to make sure that Black voters in the United States enjoyed the right to vote. The law has been updated by Congress over the decades to include other things, including language access for folks whose primary language isn’t English. There’s four communities in Rhode Island where voting is accessible in English and Spanish — Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket. And all of that is in federal law, but there have been attacks on it in the courts.
About three or four weeks ago, the US Supreme Court, in a decision called Calais versus Louisiana, undermined the purpose of that law. And we’ve seen in the South these states rushing to redistrict and eliminate these districts that have historically had Black majorities.
We had the idea last year to put in a state Voting Rights Act, knowing that these federal protections are no longer going to be enforced. Eight or nine states, depending on how you count, have done this, including Connecticut a couple of years ago. It’s a backup to the federal law when it’s not going to be enforced or when the federal courts come out with decisions like they did a few weeks ago that are hostile to the federal law. That is before the state legislature now. It had its committee hearings. We’re waiting for it to get votes.
But, at its heart, it takes that federal law from 1965 and it puts it into state law so Rhode Island voters, particularly voters of color, can enjoy the protections that they have had since 1965 under the federal law. Will it change anything the way we do things in Rhode Island? No, it’s not designed to change how we vote. It’s designed to protect against changes that might hurt, and particularly hurt communities of color. What do I mean by that? A lot of it is around redistricting. We’re seeing in the South right now, they’re eliminating so-called majority-minority districts in places like Alabama and Louisiana, Florida, Georgia.
Rhode Island has districts like that and they’ve been drawn to be in compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act. But next time we redistrict, the federal Voting Rights Act has been interpreted by Congress or by the US Supreme Court as not requiring that anymore. Next time we redistrict in Rhode Island, potentially they could break up those districts. Many of them, but not all of them exist in Providence, in Central Falls. And theoretically, the people who draw the maps in the state legislature could say, ‘You know, we don’t like that there’s a majority Black district in Providence. We’re going to break it up into a bunch of little pieces.’ That might mean there’s no longer a Black member of the state Senate. The people drawing the districts will have to worry that they’re going to get sued under the state law. In all likelihood, we won’t see much change in Rhode Island because basically the state law will protect voters of color in a way that the federal law used to.
WUN: Just to be clear, we’re talking about, Congressional districts that are being gerrymandered. But in Rhode Island, we have a lot of legislative districts that in fact can be impacted. We only have two U.S. representatives, but we have a lot of state Representatives, and those districts can be changed.
MARION: We see the news reporting out of the South about the elimination of majority Black districts in the South. They’re not talking about the fact that state legislative districts in the South are going to be gerrymandered to eliminate a lot of majority-minority districts, but they are. The priority has been gerrymandering those Congressional districts. I think you’re going to see after this next U.S. census, when they redo the state legislative lines, you’re going to see the elimination of a ton of majority-minority districts across the South. And the same could happen here unless we pass this law. Congressional redistricting is not a very complicated matter in Rhode Island because we only have two members of Congress, so you basically just split the state in half. And after the next census, in all likelihood, we’re only going to have one member of Congress, so there won’t be any district lines. They’ll just represent the whole state. This effort is really focused on redistricting at the state and local levels.
WUN: Looking nationally, there recently was a ruling in federal court relative to mail-in ballots that President Trump had proposed.
MARION: The first one, every bit of it has been struck down by federal courts because the, the president, under our Constitution, doesn’t run elections. In fact, Congress doesn’t run elections. States run elections. But he (President Trump) issued an executive order a couple of months ago that directed the Post Office not to deliver mail ballots unless there were particular circumstances that required somebody to vote by mail. And what happened was the judge said that because the Post Office has yet to try to implement it, the people suing didn’t have standing. He said it’s okay for now because they haven’t tried to do it, but he would revisit the question once the Post Office tries to set this in motion. I think the courts almost universally have struck down executive action by the president to change how people vote, because the courts recognize that under our Constitution, the president plays no role in how people vote. This was more a judge talking about issues of standing, which are important legal issues. You can’t sue unless you are being injured, and he’s saying the injury hasn’t started happening yet because the Post Office hasn’t tried to do this.
I think ultimately I’m fairly certain this is going to be stopped because the president can’t do something like this.
WUN: Will these groups have to refile once it starts, or will the judge look at and then reenact their original filings?
MARION: That’s a great question. I didn’t read the decision. I just read the news articles about the decision. I don’t know the answer to that. I will say there are a whole lot of groups, including Common Cause, which have been going to the courthouse to try to prevent this presidential action on elections because we think it’s unconstitutional. We’ve been successful. and it’s a well-coordinated effort. Even if these groups have to refile, I don’t think that’s a huge deal because there are lots of groups ready to do that because they recognize that this isn’t how you run elections in the United States. Presidents have never come in and tried to dictate how elections are run and who has access to voting.
WUN: When we take a look at this as a whole, what’s the upshot?
MARION: There’s two ways to look at it. One is we’re going to see is fewer and fewer competitive districts in the United States. We’re going to get down to about 10 out of 435 House districts that are swing districts, and all the resources will go into seeing who can win those 10 districts, and that’s just terrible. If all the other districts are gerrymandered in a way that makes them safe Republican districts or safe Democratic districts, all the resources are going to come down to those 10 or so.
I don’t think anybody agrees that that’s a great way to have a democracy that the majority of the House of Representatives comes down to so few, seats. The other thing is we’re seeing the elimination of Black political representation in a whole region of the country. At one point, 20 to 30 members of Congress from the South were African American because of maps drawn to be in compliance with the Voting Rights Act. State by state, those are being eliminated. It’s not as if Black voters no longer exist in the South. They just are being cracked among a whole bunch of districts. There’s little pockets of Black voters spread across a variety of districts. They’re not going to be able to elect a Black member of Congress. It’s not representative of who we are as a country, when we have gerrymandering that doesn’t allow all communities to have some amount of representation.
WUN: I get concerned that another offshoot of this is that Black voters in particular won’t vote out of frustration that they are unable to elect representatives that they feel represent themselves,
MARION: And it won’t just be Black voters, right? I think as we gerrymander more and more and fewer districts become competitive, people will say, ‘My vote doesn’t matter.’ Think of the analogy to the presidential election. We, know what the swing states are. Rhode Island voters, we’re not a swing state. It’s true of most states. So, unless you live in the Pennsylvanias or Michigans of the world, the presidential candidates for the most part don’t come visit. They don’t advertise. They don’t try to get their supporters out because you’re not a swing state. The same’s going to happen in Congressional elections, where you will barely have to run a campaign because the politician picked the voters in the district instead of the voters picking the politician. That is not healthy for democracy because it leads to this cynicism and apathy, where people say, ‘My vote doesn’t matter because I’m not in one of those swing districts.’
