Washington: Maybe in the era of Donald Trump it's too much to expect subtlety in American politics.
But you'd have thought that when the Supreme Court freed a slew of southern states - states which share a grim history of suppressing and denying black and other minority voting - from federal supervision, that any return to the days of Jim Crow discrimination would have been gradual and not a headlong rush.
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President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 – bringing electoral laws in 15 states under Washington's scrutiny because they were incapable of doing the decent thing. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the act, with Chief Justice John Roberts declaring that intentional racial discrimination in electoral law was a thing of the past.
But now the courts have shown they are on to what these Republican states are up to in the lead-in to a bitterly contested 2016 presidential election, and the direct language in some of their decisions is astounding.
In a ruling against North Carolina, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit accused the state legislature of targeting African-American voters with "almost surgical precision".
The ruling by a panel of three judges reads: "Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African-Americans.
"[The] totality of the circumstances - North Carolina's history of voting discrimination; the surge in African-American voting; the legislature's knowledge that African-Americans voting translated into support for one party; and the swift elimination of the tools African-Americans had used to vote and [the] imposition of a new barrier at the first opportunity to do so - cumulatively and unmistakably reveal that the General Assembly used [the law] to entrench itself.
"Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination."
![A resident wears a mask and holds a dog while voting during the presidential primary election at the Venice Beach ...](/web/20170129000650im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/f/y/i/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqjwsm.png/1470244180789.jpg)
When it comes to re-drawing electoral boundaries, Democrats in power at the state level can be as bad as Republicans. But North Carolina's Republicans set a dizzying new measure of self-serving success in 2012, when 51 per cent of votes were cast for Democrats, who won just four of 13 congressional seats in the state.
North Carolina is Ground Zero in this new age battle against discrimination, but the battlefield sprawls through 17 states, including Ohio, Wisconsin, Kansas, Texas, Arizona and Georgia.
![A resident collects an "I Voted" sticker after voting in San Francisco.](/web/20170129000650im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/j/x/c/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqjwsm.png/1470244180789.jpg)
In June, Federal District Court judge Algernon Marbley denounced a tightening of voting laws in Ohio as "a peripatetic solution in search of a problem" before saying what he really thought: "Intentional discrimination is afoot."
He went on: "Moreover, the Republican-controlled General Assembly's frenetic pace of introducing such legislation reflects questionable motives, given the wealth of other problems facing the state which actually needed solutions."
![Residents use an electronic voting machine at a polling location in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.](/web/20170129000650im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/6/c/1/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqjwsm.png/1477084856200.jpg)
In ordering an easing of tight new voter ID requirements in Wisconsin, US District judge James Peterson ruled: "The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.
"To put it bluntly, Wisconsin's strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease."
![President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.](/web/20170129000650im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/j/x/g/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqjwsm.png/1470244180789.jpg)
Just as the pro-life campaigners won support at state level for insisting on prohibitively costly, hospital-style facilities for abortion clinics, conservatives' insistence on strict voter ID regulations is argued as a defence against voter fraud – which is virtually non-existent.
So in North Carolina, you had the nonsense acceptance of a driver's licence as proof of ID, but not a government-issued public assistance card, which the poor and minorities are more likely to have than they are a driver's licence.
The New York-based Brennan Centre for Justice argues that voter fraud is more rare than people being struck by lightning; and in studying 14 years of US elections in which more than 1 billion votes were cast, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt found just 31 cases of fraud.
In an early hearing on the Wisconsin laws, district judge Lynn Adelman was withering: "The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past."
In other developed democracies, electoral reform ordinarily means getting more voters to the polls, but in the US it means suppression and obstruction of voting, usually by the poor and by African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans; and usually by Republican state governments seeking to thwart communities that traditionally vote for the Democratic Party.
The tricks played vary from state to state – deal minorities in and out of electoral districts to limit their representation; put fewer polling stations in their communities; get the cops to harass them about their voter registration; create trivial grounds for rejecting provisional votes; purge likely Democrat voters from the electoral rolls; insist on them producing the kind of photo ID they are least likely to have; set aside their votes if they can't prove US citizenship; restrict access to absentee and early voting; and launch criminal investigations into voter registration drives.
But if you want to get really nasty, you go the Texas route – and attempt to prove that "one person, one vote" doesn't mean what it says.
In April, the Supreme Court unanimously smacked down a Texas argument that electoral districts should comprise "eligible voters", not people.
The effect would have been to transfer power from cities that tend to vote Democratic, to rural areas that tend to vote Republican. It also would "disappear" from consideration in the electoral redistribution process the hundreds of thousands of Hispanic babies born each year, who are American citizens though their parents often are not; and who, on attaining age 18, would be eligible to vote.
In a nice touch, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reached back to the Founding Fathers, who conservatives are so wont to quote in defending their sense of America. Writing for the whole court, Justice Bader Ginsburg took these words from Alexander Hamilton: "There can be no truer principle than this - that every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government."
It comes as no surprise then, that during the 2016 primaries, a phone hotline set up by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law took more than 22,000 queries and complaints – 10 times as many as it did in the primaries before the 2012 presidential election.
Observing that the rights of hundreds of thousands of voters are at stake, Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, concedes that the war is not won – yet.
But writing in The New York Times, he's hopeful: "This wave of court decisions means that more eligible voters should get a chance to register to vote and cast a ballot in November. These votes will help elect a president whose choices for judges and justices will very likely seal the fate of voting rights (and much more) for a generation."