The Jim Crow Canard

By Rich Lowry

Monday, March 22, 2021

 

Stacey Abrams and like-minded progressives are dumbing down Jim Crow.

 

In a combination of rank demagoguery and misinformation, they accuse Georgia Republicans of instituting changes in election rules worthy of a hideous period of racial repression.

 

On CNN earlier this month, Abrams said of these changes, “I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”

 

“The only connection that we can find,” she continued, “is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like. And so, instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for primarily communities of color.”

 

She claimed “a direct correlation” between, among other things, “the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting.”

 

Newly minted Georgia senator Raphael Warnock devoted his first Senate floor speech to this theme.

 

“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” Warnock said.

 

This kind of talk is a staple of progressive rhetoric. “If left to their own devices, Republicans will try to limit the ability of minority voters to exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Georgia Democratic congressman Hank Johnson has said.

 

He calls it “open season on voting rights in Georgia.”

 

The Georgia legislature has been considering curtailing no-excuse absentee voting and limiting in-person early voting on Sundays, as well as requiring more ID to vote absentee, banning drop boxes, and moving up deadlines for absentee voting.

 

There is no doubt that Republicans are, in part, flailing around after suffering devastating losses in November and January, and reacting to pressure from their base that is convinced, falsely, the presidential election was stolen.

 

The proposals are a mix of the wholly ill-considered (the limit on Sunday voting, which is understandably considered an attack on the famous “souls to polls” events held by black churches); welcome security enhancements (requiring a voter to write a driver’s-license number on an absentee-ballot envelope); rollbacks of innovations meant specifically to address conditions in the pandemic (the use of drop boxes); and changes based on the belief that in-person voting is the most secure, private, and foolproof (a new age limit on no-excuse absentee voting).

 

Any comparison, though, of these proposed changes in the rules to a racist system that basically disenfranchised the entirety of the black electorate in Southern states is obviously perverse.

 

It looks as though the legislature may put aside limits on early-Sunday voting and also abandon an attempt to only allow no-excuse absentee voting for voters who are 65 or older, have a disability, or are out of town.

 

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Georgia did its worst and adopted the proposal to drastically scale back no-excuse absentee voting. Would this inarguably far-reaching measure be anything like a return to Jim Crow? Would it even materially harm the interests of African-American voters specifically or Democrats generally?

 

No, and no.

 

Prior to 2020, according to an impeccably progressive source, the Brennan Center, there was no evidence that Democrats used vote by mail at disproportionate rates.

 

Its analysis of seven states with no-excuse absentee voting concluded, “In each state we studied, at least two-thirds of all mail ballots were cast by white voters. White voters had the highest rates of voting by mail in three of the seven states and the second highest rate in another three.”

 

As for Georgia, in 2020, when methods of voting became polarized on partisan grounds, a gap opened up in rates of voting by mail, but not a huge one. About 30 percent of blacks voted by mail, whereas 24 percent of whites did. Overall, whites were still the majority of vote-by-mail voters, at 54 percent, but a markedly lower percentage than in 2016, at 67 percent.

 

What happened is that white and black voters availed themselves of absentee voting at roughly proportionate rates. Fifty-three percent of registered voters in Georgia were white in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, about the same as their share of mail-in voters.

 

Black voters, meanwhile, were 30 percent of registered voters and 31 percent of the mail-in vote.

 

To conclude on this basis that the future of racial justice, indeed much of the progress that has been forged since the Jim Crow era, depends on preserving current absentee-voting practices is silly and unfounded.

 

It also requires believing that voters are so static and poorly motivated that if, say, they can no longer vote by mail or have to do it sooner, they will give up on voting entirely. Common sense would suggest otherwise — and the evidence does, too.

 

A study published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research shreds the premises of the “new Jim Crow” critique of the GOP’s proposed changes to voting.

 

It notes that in 2020, turnout increased by as much in states without no-excuse absentee voting as in the states that adopted it for the first time.

 

Nationwide, states that did not offer no-excuse absentee voting in 2020 saw turnout increases similar in magnitude to states that newly offered no-excuse absentee voting.

 

The study looked in detail at the experience of Texas, where no-excuse absentee voting was only available to voters 65 and older.

 

If no-excuse absentee voting were the key to ramping up turnout such that limiting it is tantamount to disenfranchisement, you’d expect to see a marked fall-off in turnout among aged-64 voters, almost as old as 65-year-olds but without access to no-excuse voting.

 

Instead, 64-year-olds in Texas voted at essentially the same rate as 65-year-olds.

 

Voters older than 65 availed themselves of mail-in voting at increased rates, but the 9.5 percentage-point increase was offset by a decline in early in-person voting of 8.8 percentage points and in-person voting of 0.7 points.

 

And, by the way, turnout increased the most in Texas for voters aged 20–30 with no access to no-excuse absentee voting.

 

These findings, the authors write, are “largely consistent with studies prior to the pandemic that generally suggested that that no-excuse absentee voting has had modest or null effects on turnout before COVID-19.”

 

They argue that “in high-salience elections like 2020, there are probably very few marginal voters who base their decision to participate on the relative costs of one mode of voting over another, so long as the inconvenience and difficulty of in-person voting remains within reasonable bounds.”

 

Another alleged voter-suppression tactic, voter ID, doesn’t prove out, either.

 

In 2018, Abrams said of voter ID laws, “This is simply a redux of a failed system that is designed to both scare people out of voting and make it harder for those who are willing to push through, make it harder for them to vote.”

 

In her 2020 book, she wrote that “modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID and tangled rules for participation.”

 

But a 2019 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and robustness checks.”

 

Jim Crow, apparently, isn’t what it used to be.