President Donald Trump has incessantly talked about “nationalizing” elections, and although GOP voting restrictions like the SAVE Act are all but guaranteed not to pass, there just might be a way he could actually do it, warned Hayes Brown in an analysis published by MS NOW on Monday.
Specifically, Brown said, Trump could use the very law Republicans have spent decades trying to rip to pieces in the courts: the Voting Rights Act.
The president made this idea all too clear when he told NBC’s Tom Llamas last week, “Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Philadelphia. Take a look at Atlanta. There are some areas that are unbelievably corrupt. I could give you plenty of more too. I say that we cannot have corrupt elections” — all areas dominated by Black voters, Brown noted.
“On an abstract level, what Trump is proposing is based on similar grounds as the Voting Rights Act, or the VRA,” wrote Brown. “The Constitution clearly places the purview for running elections on the states — with a key exception. Congress is allowed to set parameters on federal elections, which then can become a template for how state and local elections are conducted.” This power was used in the VRA to eliminate poll taxes, literacy tests, and similar measures used to exclude Black voters.
While the Supreme Court struck down the formula the VRA used to put Southern states under federal oversight of their voting laws, Brown wrote, they didn’t make such “preclearance” itself illegal — meaning Trump and the GOP could try to either legislatively or judicially force preclearance onto blue states, as a means of restricting early voting, mail voting, and other options that make the franchise easier to access.
“In that context, we can see how disturbing Trump’s nationalization suggestion really is,” wrote Brown. “The areas that he would target for federal oversight include many of the same areas that the Voting Rights Act would have most fervently protected. Where Congress passed the VRA on a bipartisan basis as ‘an act to enforce the 15th Amendment,’ Trump would clearly prefer that majority-minority areas be subject to enhanced scrutiny during elections.”
“It is a small comfort that there are so few GOP legislators who are willing to publicly support that preference, even as they attempt to bring it about more subtly,” he concluded.
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