A
new poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and
The Atlantic has uncovered evidence of deep structural barriers to the ballot for black and Latino voters, specifically in the 2016 election. More than that, the survey finds that the deep wounds of Jim Crow endure, leaving America’s democratic promise unfulfilled.
The real extent of voter suppression in the United States is contested. As was the case for poll taxes and literacy tests long ago, restrictive election laws are often, on their face, racially neutral, giving them a sheen of legitimacy. But the new data from PRRI and
The Atlantic suggest that the
outcomes of these laws are in no way racially neutral. The poll, conducted in June, surveyed Americans about their experiences with voting, their assessments of the country’s political system, and their interfaces with civics. The results, especially when analyzed by race, are troublesome. They indicate that voter suppression is commonplace, and that voting is routinely harder for people of color than for their white counterparts.
research indicating that frequent changes to polling-site locations hurt minority voters more. Additionally, more than one in 10 blacks and Hispanics missed the registration deadline to vote in 2016, as opposed to just 3 percent of whites. And black and Hispanic respondents were twice as likely as white respondents to have been unable to get time off work for voting.
There are informal roadblocks as well. Under the specter of alleged voter fraud by noncitizens—which was based more on anti-immigrant sentiment than any data or other evidence—and amid increasingly incendiary rhetoric about Latinos, Hispanic voters found 2016 especially difficult. “Roughly one in 10 Hispanics said that the last time they or someone in their household tried to vote, they were bothered at the polls,” Dan Cox, the research director at PRRI, told me. “If you think about the idea of a stolen election, it fits easily into this broader narrative of cultural threat, where perceived outsiders are taking something away from people who were already there.”
These results add credence to what many critics of restrictive voting laws have long suspected. First, voter-ID laws and other, similar statutes aren’t passed in a vacuum, but rather in a country where people of color are
significantly less likely to be able to meet the new requirements. Whether intended to discriminate or not, these laws discriminate in effect, and while there is no evidence that they’ve averted any kind of fraud, there is
plenty of data detailing just how they’ve created Republican advantages. In that way, Trump’s chances in 2016 may have turned not only on the approval or disapproval of white voters, but also on how effectively state laws, access issues, and social penalties conspired to keep black and Hispanic voters away from polling places.