The turnout gap between white and Black voters is growing, study finds

The difference in turnout between white and nonwhite voters has grown over the last decade, a report released Saturday from the Brennan Center for Justice found — and a major contributor appears to be a Supreme Court decision weakening the Voting Rights Act.

The findings of the report have sparked fears about the health of American democracy from experts at the Brennan Center, a left-leaning think tank that analyzes voting rights, elections, money in politics, gerrymandering and more.

“It is just not acceptable to have a democracy that not only systematically sees lower participation from voters of color, but where that gap in participation is consistently growing,” Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center, told NBC News.

“The sheer magnitude of the racial turnout gap, I think, is alarming and should alarm all of us,” Weiser added.

The report found that the growing racial turnout gap is in part due to the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which suspended Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The racial turnout gap “is growing most quickly in parts of the country that were previously covered under Section 5,” the report found.

Section 5 was a measure that forced jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination against Black voters to seek approval from the Justice Department for any changes to voting laws or processes.

“The factor that sort of rose up as actually being a marked driver of that turnout gap was whether or not a county was previously subject to federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act before that Shelby County decision,” Weiser said.

The new restrictions on voting that have passed across the country since the Supreme Court case are significant