Shelby County Increased the Racial Turnout Gap

• In Event: The Consequences of Electoral Laws and Administration

Abstract

In 2013, the Supreme Court case Shelby County v Holder effectively nullified in one of the most important provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For nearly 50 years, Section 5 preclearance condition had required changes in voting policy in jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to be “precleared” by federal government. Section 5 covered state laws, as well as local practices like polling place location and school board redistricting. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that, because the turnout gap had closed in formerly covered jurisdictions during the Obama presidency, the preclearance regime was no longer needed.
In recent years, scholars have studied the impacts of various state and local policies on turnout, often finding racial disparities in who they affect. This project takes a broader view by asking whether the cumulative effect of all changes allowed by Shelby County impacted the racial turnout gap in formerly covered jurisdictions. We leverage individual-level national voter file snapshots shortly following each of the 2008—2022 federal elections to estimate the racial turnout gap in each county in each election. We find that Shelby County meaningfully increased the turnout gap in formerly covered jurisdictions, and that these effects are concentrated in counties where a policy had been blocked by Section 5 prior to 2013. Our results are robust to a wide variety of robustness checks related both to the estimation of voters’ race and the construction of treatment and control groups. That the turnout gap grew substantially more in formerly covered jurisdictions undermines Chief Justice Roberts’ argument against the continued need for federal preclearance under the Voting Rights Act.

Authors

• Kevin Thomas Morris, Brennan Center for Justice

• Michael G. Miller, Barnard College