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Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South. We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Black people for the use of the carceral state—police, the courts, and the prison system. We study the extent to which white communities in the US South responded to the end of Jim Crow by increasing the incarceration of Black people. We test this with new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (~1940–1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that states covered by Section 5 of the VRA experienced a differential increase in Black prison admissions relative to those that were not covered and that incarceration varied systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters. Our findings indicate the potentially perverse consequences of enfranchisement when establishment power seeks—and finds—other outlets of social and political control.

This study examines the interplay between presence of stigmatized immigrants, threat, and inter group contact that underlies radical right voting (voting propensity and actual district-level vote results). On the one hand, low-status immigrants are often stigmatized and depicted as threats. Thus, presence of stigmatized immigrants should heighten threat perceptions, thereby increasing radical right voting. On the other hand, as positive contact with stigmatized immigrants is known to reduce anti-immigrant prejudice, it should also attenuate radical right voting. As predicted, multilevel path analyses with the Swiss Election Studies 2011 data (N = 1,736 respondents in 136 districts) revealed that the proportion of stigmatized immigrants (from former Yugoslavia and Albania) in districts heightened perceived threat. Threat perceptions, in turn, increased propensity to vote for the Swiss People's Party, the major radical right party. In contrast, experiencing positive, everyday contact with former Yugoslav and Albanian immigrants reduced voting propensity through attenuated threat perceptions. Contact and threat perceptions were also related to the actual vote through voting propensity.

Objectives. To investigate the impact of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 on Black and Black versus White infant deaths in Jim Crow states. Methods. Using data from 1959 to 1980 and 2017 to 2021, we applied difference-in-differences methods to quantify differential pre–post VRA changes in infant deaths in VRA-exposed versus unexposed counties, controlling for population size and social, economic, and health system characteristics. VRA-exposed counties, identified by Section 4, were subject to government interventions to remove existing racist voter suppression policies. Results. Black infant deaths in VRA-exposed counties decreased by an average of 11.4 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.7, 21.0) additional deaths beyond the decrease experienced by unexposed counties between the pre-VRA period (1959–1965) and the post-VRA period (1966–1970). This translates to 6703 (95% CI = 999.6, 12 348) or 17.5% (95% CI = 3.1%, 28.1%) fewer deaths than would have been experienced in the absence of the VRA. The equivalent differential changes were not significant among the White or total population. Conclusions. Passage of the VRA led to pronounced reductions in Black infant deaths in Southern counties subject to government intervention because these counties had particularly egregious voter suppression practices. ( Am J Public Health. 2024;114(3):300–308. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307518 )

In their impactful work, Rushovich et al. (p. 300) Investigate the effects of passing the US Voting Rights Act in 1965 on population health inequities. The Voting Rights Act was created to prevent racial discrimination at the polls, and the provision of voting rights led to dramatic improvements in health for Black, but not White, infants. This instructive research pushes usto consider both social and political determinants of health and to interrogate the role of racism in such analyses. Voting is a critical, albeit often overlooked, factor influencing population health. Although the field of public health is beginning to study voting as a determinant of health, it must also move further upstream to consider, more broadly, how power creates and maintains health inequities.

[...]of their tireless efforts, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and the United States realized its first comprehensive, inclusive, and reticulated health policy prioritizing health equity and the social determinants of health among newly freed people and lower socioeconomic people throughout the country-the Freedmen's Bureau Act.2 HEALTH EQUITY AND DEMOCRACY INTERCONNECTED Almost 165 years after the Wide Awakes formed, it is clear that today public health needs a similar movement, a coordinated campaign to increase understanding about public health and underscore how it is a cornerstone of our democracy. [...]successive administrations have worked and succeeded in closing some of those health and health care gaps, including child vaccines, and have even secured limited health rights from the judicial branch, including the right to privacy, the right to make reproductive decisions such as the right to use contraception and the right to an abortion, and the right to health care for incarcerated individuals.3 However, we have rarely been afforded a robust opportunity to engage in the development of comprehensive health equity-focused multilevel policy interventions targeting the root causes of chronic diseases in the United States, interventions that would rise to the level of monumental proportions and significantly improve population health. Consider for example the evidence regarding equity-focused policies such as the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which afforded women the right to vote; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregated health care; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enabled African Americans to vote in jurisdictions that had limited their right to do so. Research has shown that infant mortality rates improved by up to 15% right after 19th Amendment was ratified,6 38 600 Black infant deaths were prevented because of Title VI of the civil rights law,7 and jurisdictions required to comply with the Voting Rights Act saw reductions of up to 17.5% in infant deaths in their communities.8 Since 2016, life expectancy in the United States has fallen from 34th to 60th in ranking among all nations-a trend that is expected to continue unless we take bold steps to reinvest in public health.9 Additional insights from a study led by Meharrys School of Global Health projects the costs and economic impact owing to disparate and inequitable differences in mental and physical health treatment and outcomes among various populations across the United States at a staggering $1 trillion expenditure in the next 5 years.10 TOO CLOSE TO FAIL:

Jim Crow laws in the US South effectively barred African Americans from the polls until the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) a century after the emancipation of their enslaved forebears and following the passage of constitutional amendments that ended enslavement (Thirteenth Amendment), guaranteed the right to citizenship (Fourteenth Amendment), and guaranteed the right to vote (Fifteenth Amendment). THE REPUBLICAN TRIFECTA In 2025, the Republican Party will achieve a federal trifecta, with a Republican president and control of the US House and Senate, along with the most conservative Supreme Court in decades. The Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Trump, has undone affirmative action, reversed federal protection of abortion rights, and ended the Chevron doctrine-increasing court oversight of the operational interpretation of legal statutes, previously a task often entrusted to government agency experts. With the slogan \"Make America Healthy Again,\" Kennedy will have to overcome the multiple studies that show that Republican, conservative political leadership is associated with poorer population health outcomes.\"· Krieger expanded analysis of political determinants by looking at the association between four state-level political metrics (i.e., political ideology based on voting records of US House and Senate members, US state political party control, state policies enacted, and voter political lean) and health outcomes, including infant mortality rates, premature mortality rates, and having health insurance (for adults aged 35-64 years).

In fall 1959, Black tenant farmers In Fayette County, Tennessee, were evicted from their homes and the land they worked because they had gone to the county courthouse to register to vote. Refusing to be chased away, the group erected a \"freedom tent city\" on donated land while seeking redress from the federal government. Local White people retaliated by refusing to sell them food, medicine, or basic supplies and trying to kill one of their leaders, John McFerrin, by running him over with a truck. They persisted In their efforts, living in floorless tents, \"surrounded by Inches of mud and mire\" according to civil rights activist Ella Baker, who visited them in 1961,1 The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and labor unions, meanwhile, raised funds to provide for the tent city residents' needs. For young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers such asjohn Lewis, who became involved in this support campaign, the Fayette tent city brought home the reality that Southern Black Americans' fight for voting rights was above all a struggle fortheir collective survival.1 in March 1965, Lewis and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders went on to organize the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, that culminated in the nationally televised \"Bloody Sunday\" attack by club-wielding state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spurred passage ofthe federal Voting Rights Act (VRA)2In the decades since the VRA's passage, the understanding ofthe civil rights movement as fundamentally a fight for better and healthier Black ilves has receded from popular memory in favor of revisionist narratives that cast it as a campaign for equal rights under the law.3 The article by Rushovich et al. in the current issue oJ/JPH (p. 300) brings forth new evidence to highlight the historical importance of civil rights legislation as an effective mechanism for Black Americans to secure access to the basic conditions necessary for supporting life and health. in their main analysis, the authors compare infant death rates in two groups of US counties-those where the VRA's provisions were implemented and those where they were not-for the period immediately before the passage ofthe VRA (from 1959 to 1965) and the period immediately after its implementation (1966-1970). Controlling for population size and other county characteristics, including health systems, they found that the Black (but not White) infant death rates decreased 17.3% more in the VRAexposed counties (those where the federal government intervened to remove racist voter suppression policies) than in non-VRA-exposed counties during the period of analysis.Because ofthe recent weakening of the VRA, these findings hold renewed relevance. The editorials in this issue by Pomeranz (p. 294), Rhodes (p. 291 ), and Hing (p. 297) discuss the implications of the article by Rushovich et al. in light of the US Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder, which invalidated the VRA's preclearance provision-a requirement that the federal government approve all proposed changes to voting policies in states and counties where systematic voter disenfranchisement has occurred. As Hing notes, the end of preclearance opened the way for a slew of new restrictions on voting: she cites the fact that 29 states, including 11 where any changes to voting laws would have required federal preclearance, have in the years since Shelby v Holder passed 94 restrictive voting laws. Among these, felony disenfranchisement laws and voter identification laws \"disproportionately disenfranchise voters racialized as Black.\" Pomeranz additionally calls attention to state practices that have made voting more difficult, such as Georgia's decision to close 10% of its voting locations in the decade since Shelby v Holder, despite experiencing increased voter registration, and the resulting hours-long wait times in predominantly non-White communities.

Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2017, photographer William Abranowicz was struck by the weight of historical memory at this hallowed site of one of the civil rights movement's defining episodes: 1965's \"Bloody Sunday,\" when Alabama police officers attacked peaceful marchers. To Abranowicz's eye, Selma seemed relatively unchanged from its apperance in the photographs Walker Evans made there in the 1930s. That, coupled with an awareness of renewed voter suppression efforts at state and federal levels, inspired Abranowicz to explore the living legacy of the civil and voting rights movement through photographing locations, landscapes, and individuals associated with the struggle, from Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte to the barn where Emmett Till was murdered. The result is This Far and No Further , a collection of photographs from Abranowicz's journey through the American South. Through symbolism, metaphor, and history, he unearths extraordinary stories of brutality, heroism, sacrifice, and redemption hidden within ordinary American landscapes, underscoring the crucial necessity of defending-and exercising-our right to vote at this tenuous moment for American democracy.

There is mounting evidence that increased voting and political participation are associated with improved public health, and the erection of barriers to voting can have deleterious public health consequences.1,2 Yet over the past two decades, access to the ballot has become a contentious issue with strong partisan and racial overtones. Claiming (without evidence) that US elections are marred by widespread voter fraud, many Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, call for \"election security\" measures, such as voter ID laws, that make registration and voting more difficult.3 Meanwhile, many Democrats contend that such measures alm to suppress the legitimate votes of people of color and advocate instead for policies like same-day registration and all-mail voting that expand ballot access.4 This ideological divide has manifested at the state level, with Republican-controlled states imposing new barriers to voting and Democrat-controlled states adopting policies that enhance access to the ballot.5 Recent research suggests that state partisan polarization in ballot accessibility may have contributed to interstate inequalities in public health outcomes in critical areas such as COVID-19 case and mortality rates.6Partisan and geographic polarization in ballot access has been exacerbated by a conservative retrenchment in voting rights jurisprudence on the US Supreme Court. Since the 1970s, and accelerating between the 2000s and 2020s, the court's decisions have gradually eroded the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the most important federal voting rights law.7 In Its landmark decision in Shelby County v Holder (2013), the court invalidated a crucial provision requiringjurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to seek federal approval for proposed changes in their election laws.8 The elimination of this preclearance requirement has made it easier for Republican governments in previously covered states to erect new barriers to voting that may disproportionately burden voters of color.9Scholars are just beginning to grapple with the public health implications of the erosion of the federal government's capacity to enforce voting rights for communities of color. In this issue of AJPH, Rushovich et al. (p.300) shed light on this matter by appraising the historical impact of preclearance on infant mortality among African Americans and White Americans. Using data from 1959 to 1980, they applied differencein-difference methods to examine preto post-VRA changes in deaths both in counties that were required to submit proposed changes in election laws and in comparable counties that were not subject to this requirement. What difference did preclearance have on infant mortality?According to the authors, preclearance made the difference between life and death for thousands of African American infants between 1965 and 1980. African American infant deaths in preclearance-exposed counties decreased by 11.2 additional deaths per 1000 population of individuals younger than one year beyond the decrease experienced by unexposed counties between the pre-VRA period (1959-1965) and the immediate post-VRA period (1966-1970). This translates to 17.3% fewer African American infant deaths during this period than would have occurred in the absence of the federal preclearance requirement. The authors also reveal the longer-term impacts of preclearance by showing that African American infant deaths per 1000 population younger than one year in preclearance-exposed counties continued to decrease more swiftly relative to unexposed counties between 1971 and 1980. Notably, the beneficial effect of preclearance on infant survival was concentrated among African American infants, with no significant differences among Whites or the total population.