To: i-node who wrote (953095 ) 8/3/2016 8:18:41 AM From: Alighieri Read Replies (2) | Respond to These laws go much further than simply requiring photo ids...“the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices.” After receiving that data, “the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.” Indeed, this data appears to have guided the state’s lawmakers in drafting a law that would have maximal impact on African-Americans.The legislature’s data on racial voting patterns showed that “African Americans disproportionately used the first seven days of early voting,” and so “the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting.” The data showed that “African American voters disproportionately used [same-day registration] when it was available,” and so same-day registration was cut as well. The law also eliminated out-of-precinct voting, which “required the Board of Elections in each county to count the provisional ballot of an Election Day voter who appeared at the wrong precinct, but in the correct county, for all of the ballot items for which the voter was eligible to vote.” African-Americans, meanwhile, were especially likely to take advantage of this practice. Yet for all these changes, the lawmakers exempted absentee voting from the law’s new voter ID restriction, and it did so after discovering “that African Americans did not disproportionately use absentee voting; whites did.” Thus, as Motz summarizes the facts of the case, “the General Assembly enacted legislation restricting all — and only — practices disproportionately used by African Americans.”
