Is the Voting Rights Act

being gutted by the USSC?

New and more technically sophisticated methods of minority voter suppression were employed in subsequent elections, and may well have tipped the balance in Ohio in the 2004 presidential campaign, ensuring Bush the electoral votes needed for reelection. These include so-called “voter caging,” in which mass mailings are sent to predominately minority areas in the months before an election. The mail returned as undeliverable is stockpiled and used at the polls to challenge the right of the addressees to vote.

Republican-controlled governments in Georgia, Indiana and other states have enacted laws requiring voters to bring photo ID to the polls, a measure which has been upheld by the Supreme Court as politically neutral, but which has the deliberate effect of reducing the proportion of poor, minority and immigrant workers able to vote, since they are least likely to have photo IDs.

Given the probability that the five right-wing justices—the same five who upheld the photo ID law in Indiana last year—were prepared to overturn Section 5, it seems apparent that they pulled back from doing so because of political considerations.