The Judge Is Not Persuaded

Open season on minority voters is closed. This "voter fraud" meme has never been anything but a Trojan Horse for minority-vote suppression:

The Republican National Committee will not be able to use election tactics that have been linked to suppression of voting by racial minorities without court supervision, a federal judge in New Jersey has ruled.

The measures, known as “ballot security” programs, were the subject of a lawsuit between the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee that ended with a consent decree in 1982. Under the agreement, some election tactics could only be used with court approval, including the creation of voter challenge lists, photographing voters at the polls and posting off-duty police and sheriffs officers at the polls in minority precincts.

The restrictions on the Republican National Committee were extended by the courts to cover the nation in 1987.

Last November, the Republican Party went to court seeking to end the decree, arguing in part that a rise in voter fraud required the change. A voting expert for the Republicans, Tom Josefiak, argued in court that the political landscape had shifted, with African-Americans serving as president and attorney general.

With such officials in place, Mr. Josefiak had testified, he found it hard to believe that laws on the books regarding voter fraud, intimidation and suppression were not “going to be actively pursued by this Justice Department.”

Mr. Josefiak also testified that the chairman of the Republican National Committee and its chief administrative officer are African-American, and that the party had no incentive to intimidate minority voters.

In an opinion issued on Tuesday, Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise of Federal District Court ruled that the Republicans failed to show that conditions had changed enough to justify changing the agreement.

“It does not appear that the R.N.C.’s incentive to suppress minority votes has changed since 1982,” Judge Debevoise wrote, citing statistics showing that most minority voters support Democrats. “It appears that the R.N.C. has been largely unsuccessful in its efforts to attract minority voters. Until it is able to do so, it will have an incentive to engage in the type of voter suppression that it allegedly committed in the actions that led to the enactment and modification of the consent decree.”

The judge dismissed arguments by Republican advocates that voter fraud is a growing problem, and said suppression of minority voters was a more serious issue.

In his ruling, which is likely to be appealed, Judge Debevoise did agree to narrow the scope of the consent decree somewhat. He agreed that some forms of poll watching would be allowed, narrowed the definition of ballot security program to include “only efforts that are aimed at preventing potential voters from casting a ballot” and set an eight-year expiration date on the agreement. He noted that the agreement could be extended if violations were proved.

Richard L. Hasen of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles called the decision “a major development” in election law, since the judge found that Republicans still had electoral incentives to suppress minority votes even in the absence of “racial animus.”

The Democratic National Committee hailed the decision as “a resounding repudiation of the Republican Party’s trumped-up claims of voter fraud.”