In the wake the the United States Supreme Court’s Callais decision making racial gerrymandering harder to justify, many Democrats made outlandish claims about it.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for example, posted to X “Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court is silencing Black voters.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) posted “Trump's Supreme Court is dragging us back to the dark and ugly days of Jim Crow.”
These and other claims were flagged on X using #PolitiFactThis, a hashtag PolitiFact has said it follows to help find fact check topics.
Disclosure: Zebra Fact Check applied the #PolitiFactThis hashtag to the listed claims, plus a few others.
Was PolitiFact avoiding obviously sketchy claims from Democrats deliberately? That’s the hypothesis that first appealed to us, but after reading PolitiFact’s fact check of Republican Byron Donalds’ explanation of the origins of the Voting Rights Act, it more appears that PolitiFact takes for granted that the SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act (bold emphasis added):
The 1965 Voting Rights Act has long been considered a landmark Civil Rights era achievement that aimed to end discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote.
But a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling largely gutted the law, and many Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the GOP frontrunner in the race for Florida governor — celebrated the court’s decision.
Those two paragraphs open the fact check of Donalds. Note carefully what PolitiFact did. It correctly noted the VRA attempted to end discriminatory practices against Blacks’ ability to vote. Right after, PolitiFact states as fact that the SCOTUS “largely gutted” the VRA.
Whether our readers agree or disagree with that statement, we aim to show PolitiFact had no business claiming it.
See how PolitiFact helpfully gave us a hotlink highlighting the word “gutted”? That URL leads to an opinion article in The New Yorker. What makes a fact checker think that serves as an appropriate anchor for a key claim in a fact check? The New Yorker has the story paywalled, though it claims registering provides access. I say “claims” because we registered and were only able to glimpse the story before it was replaced with the announcement that our window was closing. That happened a number of times. That means it’s tough to verify whether the opinion piece nails PolitiFact’s claim down as a fact. But aside from that, PolitiFact sows its own seeds of doubt.
The Mismatch Between the VRA’s Purpose and the ‘Gutted’ Claim
We noted that PolitiFact explained the original aim of the VRA. Later in the fact check PolitiFact offered more specifics:
The Voting Rights Act was created to combat discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote, including literacy and property tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, voter roll purges, intimidation and violence.
PolitiFact’s logic doesn’t fit.
If the SCOTUS “largely gutted” the VRA, shouldn’t we expect some specific erosion of one or more of the protections PolitiFact says the VRA was intended to establish?
Did the SCOTUS open the door for literary and property tests? Poll taxes? Violence? Any of it?
PolitiFact offered not a shred of evidence that’s the case.
The SCOTUS decision means government attempts to use racial gerrymandering will receive strict scrutiny when they come before the courts, making the actions much harder to justify. And it said racial gerrymandering shall not serve as an appropriate means of implementing the Voting Rights Act.
PolitiFact doesn’t mention it, though it’s loosely implied in the rating Donalds received, but the Voting Rights Act doesn’t address gerrymandering. Reading the high court’s decision, which isn’t overlong, explains it.
“Racist Gerrymandering”
We didn’t recall ever seeing the term “racist gerrymander” in a news story before. The term “racial gerrymander” occurs commonly, though, likely stemming from its neutral connotation. “Racist gerrymander” counts as a term of moral judgment and thus should not occur in objective journalism unless it’s coming from a quotation.
“Racist gerrymandering” occurs three times in PolitiFact’s story, likely intended to distinguish the approved practice of using racial gerrymandering to increase Black and Democrat representation in Congress from the disapproved practice of deliberately diluting Black votes.
Diluting non-Black votes to benefit Democrats is okay, you see. It’s a racial gerrymander, not a racist gerrymander.
The Donalds fact check serves as a textbook case of allowing ideology to suffuse ostensibly neutral journalism. It’s appropriate to fact check whether the Supreme Court’s decision “largely gutted” the VRA, not present it as fact backed by an opinion article.
It seems PolitiFact avoids fact-checking whether the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act simply because PolitiFact uncritically regards it as true.