Recent weeks have seen courts around the country rejecting and raising concerns about voting laws that seek to keep people of color (especially Black people), low-income people, and other marginalized groups away from the polls. Courts have struck down voter ID laws, ordered lower courts to suss out racial discrimination, and blocked efforts to impose new voting restrictions. These rulings are a small victory against widespread efforts to enact laws that explicitly limit voting rights of historically disenfranchised communities.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, voting rights are under attack in a different way. Michigan’s so-called “emergency manager” law, Public Act 436, allows the state to replace locally elected mayors, city councils, and school boards with unelected emergency managers appointed by and accountable only to the governor. While the law does not directly limit the ability of residents in these jurisdictions to physically cast a vote in a local election, it renders those votes meaningless by preventing the officials they elect from exercising any of the powers of the offices to which they were elected, while unelected, state-appointed officials, unaccountable to voters, govern in their place, often with tragic consequences.
Tomorrow, civil rights attorneys will urge an appellate court to reinstate claims in CCR’s case Phillips v. Snyder, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Michigan’s emergency manager law. Though the lower court allowed a racial discrimination claim under the Equal Protection Clause to move forward, it dismissed claims that the law also violates the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating on the basis of income, violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it disproportionately disenfranchises Black voters, denies citizens the right to petition their government protected by the First Amendment, and violates the constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government.
Michigan’s emergency manager law strikes not only at the right to vote as a fundamental constitutional right, but also at the right to vote as the basis of democracy. As Alexis de Toqueville recognized almost 200 years ago, the ability to elect representatives to govern local communities is the foundation of American democracy. If those who are elected cannot actually serve the electorate that put them in office, the right to vote is meaningless. The undemocratic spirit of the emergency manager law is underscored by the fact that it was enacted just one month after a statewide voter referendum repealed a nearly identical emergency manager law, which CCR had also challenged in a lawsuit.
Moreover, when these democratic principles are undermined, there are serious real life consequences in communities for whom democracy has been effectively canceled. As we saw in Flint, Michigan, where an unelected emergency manager switched the city’s water supply to the polluted Flint River and poisoned the population, decisions made by those who are unaccountable to the communities they serve are often not in the best interests of those communities. Instead, those decisions can be downright dangerous. And, unsurprisingly, it is disproportionately low income communities and communities of color who suffer these consequences. Emergency managers have been put in charge of the same communities routinely targeted by voter suppression laws. More than 50 percent of Michigan’s Black residents have lived under emergency manager rule at one time or another during the past three years, while only 2 percent of the white population has.
Michigan’s law is unprecedented. Nowhere else in our nation’s history have all the legislative and executive powers of elected government been literally transferred to a single unelected individual with the power to hire and fire public employees, pass and repeal local laws, enter into and terminate city contracts, buy and sell public land, and alter the curriculum of local public schools. But if impacted communities are unable to challenge Act 436, it may not be the last “emergency manager” attack on democracy.
The recent flutter of rulings against laws that restrict voting rights is encouraging, even if it is just a small part of a big problem. By reinstating the claims in our lawsuit against Michigan’s emergency manager law, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals can play another small part in solving the problem of voter suppression that is a huge threat to our democracy.
