Alabama After Shelby v. Holder : Polling Place Changes and Access to Polling Place Information
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Alabama After Shelby v. Holder: Polling Place Changes and Access to Polling Place Information Taylor C. McInerney 1 & Kayla Z. Thompson 1 & Kimberly K. Shackelford 1 & Felicia J. Tuggle 1 & Jennifer F. Jettner 1 Accepted: 2 November 2020 / Published online: 11 November 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract While ensuring the voting rights of all citizens in this country is assumed to be a modern established norm, the fight continues in many states against voter disenfranchisement and discriminatory exclusions from the democratic process. The landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Shelby v. Holder (2013), allowed states with historically discriminatory voting processes to make changes to their voting laws without federal oversight. Since this decision, some states have closed or moved an alarming number of polling places, according to the Leadership Conference Education Fund (2019). Thus, we explored the extent of polling place changes in Alabama. This research involved contacting county election offices to obtain publicly available data on polling place changes, closures, and consolidations. The process and challenges of obtaining information are also included, such as the process of identifying the correct county level election office and election official, revising the wording of questions asked, and noting the response rates and challenges to obtaining polling place data. The results indicate that locating appropriate election officials and requesting polling place information are challenging and burdensome, and the number of polling place changes (including closures, moves, and consolidations) exceeds the number estimated by previous reports. Keywords Social justice . Voting rights act . Voter disenfranchisement . Policy practice
Introduction Despite the 15th Amendment (1870), which ostensibly guaranteed the voting franchise, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was passed in 1965 under Lyndon B. Johnson’s
* Taylor C. McInerney [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA
166
Journal of Policy Practice and Research (2020) 1:165–177
administration to ensure that African American were able to exercise their right to vote (Davidson 1992). The VRA, considered one of the most sweeping voting laws, prohibited the use of literacy tests and stated that any area where local or state government imposed voting laws resulted in racial discrimination was illegal. The VRA also instituted the controversial Section 5, which provided federal oversight over voting registration in certain locales (Davidson 1992). The VRA Section 5 made it so that changes had to have “pre-clearance” meaning that changes in these locales had to be approved and that the burden of proof was on locales to show how changes were not discriminatory; thus, providing legal challenges with a mechanism to enforce the law (Davidson 1992). Specifically, VRA Section 4(b) provided the “coverage formula” which specified which states and counties that had to receive federal permission fo
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