It’s been a rough week for democracy with the Supreme Court finally losing all of its inhibitions and gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our Fearless Leader Adrastos covered it in fine style. I’m weighing in now because some people seem confused by how all of the logic holds together. Like this:
Except it’s not meant to make any logical sense.
It’s not meant to make sense because it was written by Justice Alito, a person who is so allergic to facts that he must cover himself in calamine lotion before he puts pen to paper. All you have to do is to think back to his ridiculous arguments in Dobbs. The guy is a fanatic and a weirdo. And he was at it again in Callais.
What makes Callais special is that it fully uncloaks the extremist wing of SCOTUS’ embrace of white supremacy. There should be no confusion or misunderstanding or attempts to fact check his opinion because it’s not about law. It’s about racism. It’s about doing it white.
To that end, Alito deliberately used fake data to undergird his argument:
In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”
But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.
The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.
And yet it’s still difficult for some to grasp. But the DOJ understood that it was about doing it white.
So does Shad White (yes, that is his real name), the Mississippi state auditor:
President Grievance gets it:
Q: To African Americans concerned this is going to draw Black members of Congress off the map, what do you say?TRUMP: I think it's been a wonderful process. The Democrats have been cheating on elections for many years.
And state level Republicans most definitely understand that it’s about doing it white:
I’ll leave you with this: