This town is sending cops to black residents’ homes to dispute their voting rights

This town is sending cops to black residents’ homes to dispute their voting rights
Tom Cahill | August 1, 2016
Police are apparently being used to intimidate black voters in a small Georgia town.
In Sparta, the seat of Hancock County, roughly 100 miles away from Atlanta, police are being dispatched to the homes of the town’s 180 black residents to issue a court summons. These voters must show up in court to prove their residence or lose their right to vote. African American voters make up about 20 percent of Sparta’s registered voters.
According to the New York Times, the Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration is mostly white.
“People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime,” Sparta elections official Marion Warren told the Times.
These strict regulations on voting most often disproportionately affect African Americans and fly in the face of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). However, due to a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in 2013, black voters’ protection from Jim Crow laws are largely nonexistent. In the Shelby County v. Holder ruling, the conservative majority on the court argued that the racial protection clause in the VRA is no longer necessary, since racism doesn’t exist anymore (seriously).
“…[T]he conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions. By 2009, ‘the racial gap in voter registration and turnout [was] lower in the States originally covered by §5 than it [was] nationwide… Since that time, Census Bureau data indicate that African American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by §5, with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent.”
Since Section 4 of the VRA was ruled unconstitutional, states that previously employed Jim Crow laws are now finding new, creative ways to discriminate against black voters. However, federal courts are finally starting to crack down on some of those laws. In North Carolina, for instance, a federal court just ruled the state’s voter ID law was unconstitutional, as it intentionally targeted African American voters and made it more difficult for black residents to cast ballots.
Georgia is considered a potential battleground state in the 2016 election. Black voter registration continues to rise, making the Democratic Party more viable in the Southern state.
Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com.