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struck down portions of the Voting Rights Act today

, it noted that the doomed section of the Act is no longer constitutional partly because the method of determining which states should be subject to it is outdated.

 the opinion of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts

Now consider this chart, organized by the Washington Post, based on data from the U.S. Elections Project for the presidential election of 2012. This indicates actual  turnout.

The national voter turnout rate in the election was 58.2 percent.

Using the Act's formula,  only one state -- Hawaii -- has a turnout rate 12 points lower than the national average. Meanwhile, Alabama, the state in which the county challenging the Act resides, had a voter turnout rate higher than the national average. So did, in fact, 34 of the 50 states.

In 2012, Blacks voted at a higher rate (66.2 percent) than non-Hispanic Whites (64.1 percent) for the first time since the Census Bureau started publishing voting rates by the eligible citizenship population.

Broken down by Census Bureau divisions, registered blacks are more likely to vote than registered whites (see 

Now compare it to the map showing which states (shown in red) are covered by the section of the Act struck down today.

By almost any measure, that's a success story and Justice Roberts acknowledged as much when he noted that it is probably due to the sections of the Act the court struck down today.

There are probably states now, based on the data above that should be subject to provisions of the Act, that currently are not. And the Supreme Court obviously invited Congress to consider doing that. The likelihood of that happening seems remote, given that the task of coming up with a definition to identify states with voter discrimination is hard and Congress has shown neither a willingness nor an ability to tackle hard issues.

NewsCut

Bob Collins

Author

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down portions of the Voting Rights Act today, it noted that the doomed section of the Act is no longer constitutional partly because the method of determining which states should be subject to it is outdated. Here is the explanation in the opinion of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts:…

How do you identify states that discriminate against minority voters?

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