One of the hottest elements in last week’s heated oral argument in the Supreme Court over the Voting Rights Act occurred when the Chief Justice attempted, without success, to get the Solicitor General to explain the rationality (and hence the legal justification) of the old coverage formula, unchanged since 1975, that imposed “pre-clearance” obligations on Mississippi but not Massachusetts. Massachusetts, the Chief Justice noted, has the “worst ratio of white voter turnout to African American voter turnout” while Mississippi “has the best,” and Massachusetts “has the greatest disparity in registration between white and African American” while Mississippi is third best in the nation.
This prompted a rant from William Galvin, the Massachusetts Secretary of State, who found it “disturbing that the chief justice of the United States would spew this kind of misinformation.”
Now Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute has demonstrated that, however disturbed he may be, Galvin is flat wrong about the numbers.
Read the whole thing.
ADDENDUM
Linda Greenhouse, formerly of the New York Times but still of its ethos, is Galvin-ized into making the same MISS-stakes.
