How Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Helped Georgia Discriminate Again

Less than a month before Election Day, civil rights organizations are suing the state of Georgia for its controversial “exact match” system. The program suspends a person’s voting status if the information they enter on their voter registration form doesn’t precisely match state driver’s license and social security records.

This means that if a person lists his first name as “Tom” on his voter registration form, but his driver’s license record shows his first name as “Thomas” then his file is placed in “pending” status until it is corrected. The same goes for someone who might omit a hyphen in their last name. As of July 4, there were just over 51,000 such people whose voting status is currently in pending mode as a result of this “exact match” system, with 80 percent of those being African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. The bulk of those on that list are African Americans. What’s disturbing about this is that a section of the Voting Rights Act that was notoriously eliminated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 could have prevented this potential tragedy.