Throwing Away the Umbrella: Minority Voting after the Supreme Court's Shelby Decision
Name
VRA_resubmittedWPversion_winter2024.pdf
Size
6.17 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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0a8535e91aae1a494a09353581146a4a
Author(s)
Komisarchik, Mayya
White, Ariel
Huff, Connor
Lucas, Christopher
Palmer, Max
Date Issued
April 14, 2025
Journal
Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Publisher
Emerald
Citation
Komisarchik M, White A (2025), "Throwing Away the Umbrella: Minority Voting after the Supreme Court’s Shelby Decision". Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Vol. 20 No. 2 pp. 269–305.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder dramatically changed the Voting Rights Act, ending the "preclearance" process that had required federal approval before places with a history of discrimination changed their voting procedures. Dissenting justices and voting-rights advocates feared the decision could allow changes to election administration that would suppress minority voter participation. This paper evaluates the decision's impact on election practices and on voting. Shelby yielded decisive changes in some practices that had been constrained by preclearance (voter identification laws), though evidence on potential indirect changes to election administration is mixed. These bounded changes to election practices do not appear to have translated into a degradation of minority voter participation or power over the period studied. Using administrative data and a differencein-differences design comparing places affected and unaffected by the court's decision, we find minimal changes in Black-white voting gaps in the post-Shelby period; further analyses indicate that voter participation was generally stable or potentially increasing in previouslycovered places.
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00023045
