In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But for decades, Republicans have fought to circumvent the law by describing their proposed restrictions — requiring specific forms of identification to vote, preventing early voting, purging voting rolls — as colorblind security measures, even though there is little evidence of any individual voter fraud in the United States.”
How did that approach to denying Black voters their hard-fought rights get on Donald Trump’s radar screen? Berman had a plausible answer: Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, who had been on a crusade to use the kind of fake voting fraud allegations that were pervasive in the South to justify measures that could be used to keep the wrong kind of people—Kobach is a Republican—from voting. Kobach was the force behind Arizona’s 2010 “show me your papers” law, which, among other things, required proof of citizenship in order to register to vote and strict voter ID requirements (We discussed that Arizona law as the origin story for one of this year’s voting rights cases on the Supreme Court calendar.) Kobach was also one of the primary drafters of Alabama’s HB56, the law my office successfully challenged in court. It too combined anti-immigrant measures with anti-voting measures.
You’re probably starting to sense the theme. False claims that noncitizen voting...
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...