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Page Number: 54

10 

BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

the Voting Rights Act After Shelby County, 115 Colum. L. 
Rev. 2143, 2145–2146 (2015).  Other States—Alabama, Vir-
ginia,  Mississippi—fell  like  dominoes,  adopting  measures 
similarly vulnerable to preclearance review.  See ibid.  The 
North  Carolina  Legislature,  starting  work  the  day  after 
Shelby County, enacted a sweeping election bill eliminating 
same-day  registration,  forbidding  out-of-precinct  voting, 
and reducing early voting, including souls-to-the-polls Sun-
days.  (That law went too far even without Section 5: A court 
struck it down because the State’s legislators had a racially 
discriminatory  purpose.    North  Carolina  State Conference 
of NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F. 3d 204 (CA4 2016).)  States 
and localities redistricted—drawing new boundary lines or 
replacing neighborhood-based seats with at-large seats—in 
ways  guaranteed  to  reduce  minority  representation.    See 
Elmendorf, 115 Colum. L. Rev., at 2146.  And jurisdictions 
closed  polling  places  in  mostly  minority  areas,  enhancing 
an already pronounced problem.  See Brief for Leadership 
Conference on Civil and Human Rights et al. as Amici Cu-
riae 14–15 (listing closure schemes); Pettigrew, The Racial 
Gap in Wait Times, 132 Pol. Sci. Q. 527, 527 (2017) (finding 
that lines in minority precincts are twice as long as in white 
ones, and that a minority voter is six times more likely to 
wait more than an hour).2 
  And  that  was  just  the  first  wave  of  post-Shelby  County 

—————— 

2 Although  causation  is  hard  to  establish  definitively,  those  post- 
Shelby County changes appear to have reduced minority participation in 
the next election cycle.  The most comprehensive study available found 
that in areas freed from Section 5 review, white turnout remained the 
same, but “minority participation dropped by 2.1 percentage points”—a 
stark  reversal  in  direction  from  prior  elections.    Ang,  Do  40-Year-Old 
Facts Still Matter?, 11 Am. Econ. J.: Applied Economics, No. 3, pp. 1, 35 
(2019).  The results, said the scholar who crunched the numbers, “provide 
early evidence that the Shelby ruling may jeopardize decades of voting 
rights progress.”  Id., at 36.  The election laws passed in Shelby County’s 
wake “may have negated many of the gains made under preclearance.”  
Ibid.