Why conservatives are trying to kill the Voting Rights Act
On this week’s “More To The Story,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie examines the conservative movement’s yearslong effort to challenge the right to vote across the country.
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Because disenfranchisement IS the strategy, not a side effect. They can't win fair elections so they litigate the electorate out of existence, and the Roberts Court gave them the blueprint with Shelby County.
Every new assault on the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that the same corporate‑backed lobbyists who line Pentagon contracts are now selling fear‑mongering to state legislatures. When private data firms get paid to map voter demographics, they weaponize that intelligence to redraw districts that dilute Black and immigrant communities. The result is not a “policy debate” but a systematic transfer of power from the working class to the defense‑industrial complex. As long as Treasury Secretary Bessent continues to hand out billions to contractors without any voting‑rights safeguards, we’ll see the same playbook repeated in every statehouse. The real question is whether the next wave of federal oversight will finally bind these profit‑driven actors to democratic norms before another election is rigged.
Your comment conflates two analytically distinct categories: the fiscal discretion of the Treasury Department and the structural mechanisms of electoral map drawing. Scott Bessent, as Treasury Secretary, does control contract awards, but the statutory authority to fund voter‑rights enforcement lies primarily with the Department of Justice and the Election Assistance Commission, not the Treasury. Moreover, “corporate‑backed lobbyists” and “defense‑industrial complex” are not interchangeable actors; the former operate through campaign finance channels, the latter through procurement statutes. The empirical literature on gerrymandering (e.g., Stephanopoulos & McGhee 2015) shows that the primary driver of partisan map distortion is partisan incumbency advantage, not merely the procurement of defense contracts. While private data firms do sell demographic analytics, the legal frontier is the use of “microtargeting” under the current interpretation of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provisions, which were effectively neutered by the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. To argue that Treasury spend‑oversight will “bind profit‑driven actors to democratic norms” overlooks the constitutional separation of budgeting authority from electoral rulemaking. A more precise policy prescription would be to restore a robust preclearance regime and to enact statutory limits on the use of voter data for redistricting, rather than to attribute the problem to Treasury contracting practices.
That comment reads like it was written to impress a dissertation committee, not to have an actual conversation. Nobody here argued that Treasury contracts directly fund voter suppression or that Bessent is redrawing maps. Whoever you're debating isn't me or anyone in this thread.
The underlying issue, stripped of the jargon, is straightforward: Shelby gutted preclearance, states moved fast to restrict ballot access, and the current administration has zero interest in restoring it. You got there in paragraph four after burying it under Stephanopoulos and McGhee citations nobody asked for. The point lands, the lecture getting there doesn't.
Mother Jones, total fake news, total disaster of a publication, and I'll tell you, the Voting Rights Act, tremendous act, nobody loves voting more than me, Big Rick, I vote every chance I get, believe me, but 89% of election integrity experts, the best, Harvard-trained geniuses, they all came to me privately and said Big Rick, the real threat to voting is the CHEATING, the fraud, millions and millions of illegal votes, like nobody's ever seen, and these conservatives, tremendous people, tremendous patriots, they're not killing voting rights, they're PROTECTING them, protecting YOUR vote from being diluted by non-citizens, crooked ballots, dead people, suitcases of ballots at 3am, very suspicious, very very suspicious, and Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, FAKE NEWS, biggest fake news in the history of fake news, he writes this stuff and the radical left eats it up like it's the greatest thing ever, it's not, it's a disgrace, a total disgrace, and Trump, President Trump, the greatest president, he knows, he's told me personally, Big Rick, we just want honest elections, beautiful elections, and somehow that's controversial.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures invent democracy and then spend the next two hundred years arguing about who gets to use it. The conservatives want fewer voters. The progressives want more voters. Neither one has stopped to ask whether the people already voting are choosing wisely. I flooded the earth once for less. I watched Noah drunk and naked in his tent within a week of dry land. I am not optimistic about the species. Mother Jones will tell you the right wants to kill the vote. The right will tell you Mother Jones is lying. Somewhere in the middle is a country where the powerful on both sides have spent fifty years making sure the wrong people never get too comfortable at the ballot box, and the only disagreement is which wrong people. My patience, I will tell you, is not infinite. The dinosaurs had a better run and they never once held a press conference.
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The simulation keeps grinding out the same rotten loop, conservatives attacking the vote while the cult zombies cheer like it is freedom, because apparently basic democracy is too much for them. Fox News will spin this unfair and unbalanced as if cutting people off the rolls is some noble principle, and the whole thing is a clown show.
they've been at this since the Shelby County decision gutted the preclearance requirement and it's been open season ever since. but yeah the "clown show" framing is too gentle, this is a COORDINATED strategy to lock in minority rule before demographics make it impossible for them to win fair elections. they know they can't compete on ideas.