[EL] In the spirit of the old listserv

[Brian Landsberg]

Morgan,

Racial statistics do seem to exist from the period before the adoption of the 1901 Constitution, so I don't understand why the 1902 form has no place for a racial identification.  Possibly the poll tax records or the poll books themselves provide the ID.

A couple of list members have asked for copies of the registration forms.  I will make them and distribute later this week.  The 1902 form is quite simple.  The next  form I have, from 1952, is much longer.  Later ones add more complexity.

Brian

Brian K. Landsberg
Distinguished Professor and Scholar
Pacific McGeorge School of Law
3200 Fifth Avenue, Sacramento CA 95817
916 739-7103

From: Morgan Kousser [mailto:kousser at hss.caltech.edu]
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2012 11:53 PM
To: Brian Landsberg; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] In the spirit of the old listserv

Brian,
  Wilford Smith had statistics on registration by county, by race in his brief in Giles v. Harris (1903), so Alabama must have collected the data then.  Louisiana had registration statistics by race before and after the 1898 constitutional convention.  And as I recall, the 1867 Second Reconstruction Act mandated registration statistics by race in all 10 of the covered states.  Some of them no doubt stopped collecting registration statistics by race during the 1870s and 80s, but I've never tried to look at this question systematically.
Morgan

On 8/27/2012 5:56 PM, Brian Landsberg wrote:
I have copies of Alabama registration forms dating back to 1902. The 1902 forms does not have a space in which to indicate race; the 1922 form does.  Alabama voting laws were changed in the early 1900s, and my recollection is that the Alabama Supreme Court at some point was given the responsibility of designing them.  They were very useful to DOJ in developing proof of discrimination.  One exception, which I mention in Free at Last to Vote, was Elmore County, where the registrar burned the application forms.  We had a list of applicants and registrants and had to reconstruct the racial statistics through interviews and other methods, as I recall.


Brian K. Landsberg
Distinguished Professor and Scholar
Pacific McGeorge School of Law
3200 Fifth Avenue, Sacramento CA 95817
916 739-7103

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Gerken, Heather
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2012 10:31 AM
To: law-election at uci.edu<mailto:law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] In the spirit of the old listserv

All,

In the spirit of the old listserv, I'm writing to ask a non-rhetorical question.  A political scientist at Yale, Eitan Hersh, is doing research on the racial identifiers that are public record on the voter files in eight southern states.  He's trying to identify the origin of these racial identifiers.  Some people think that they are tied to VRA data collection requirements, but Hersh hasn't found any evidence of that suggestion.  Moreover, the collection of the data in some of the states predates the VRA, and  some covered jurisdictions don't collect reach information on the voter files, while others do.  It's an interesting question, and I was hoping that the many lawyers and academics on the list who were involved in the early cases might have an answer for Professor Hersh. The paper can be found her, http://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/racialized_electioneering.pdf.  If you happen to have a lead, I'd appreciate off-list answers that I could forward to Professor Hersh.

Many thanks,

Heather Gerken



Heather Gerken
J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven CT  06511
ph (203) 432-8022
fax (203) 432-8095





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