Americans really care about fairness. This is perhaps most easily and most dramatically apparent in NFL football games. We all can remember the disastrous season with the replacement referees. Fans felt that the outcome of some games was determined due to bad calls by well-meaning, but ill-prepared referees.
And to this day there is still talk about the incredibly bad call in the 2019 Saints-Rams game. Nickell Robey-Coleman flattened (and I mean flattened!) Tommylee Lewis just before he was about to catch a critical pass. Fans saw it as wildly unfair and were so upset about the missed call, they sued the NFL!
With a ratio of 1 official for every three athletes and a long list of rules and regulations, there is only one goal: To make the games fair and competitive.
In 2013 the Supreme Court invalidated a fundamental section of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). And Chief Justice Roberts wrote that he voted to overturn Section 4 of the VRA because so much progress had been made that “current data” showed it was no longer relevant.
If the NFL used the same logic as Chief Justice Roberts, they might make a ludicrous decision: “The 3rd quarter was clean, so (using this current data) we don’t need any officials for the 4th quarter.” We know what would happen, if that decision were ever made: The fourth quarter would be a disaster of penalty-worthy actions on every play!
The same has proven to be true for the Voting Rights Act. The only reason that so much progress was made in Voting Rights is that there were officials watching.
After the 2020 election the Georgia legislature met, and, with no federal oversight, took swift action. As Nick Corasaniti wrote in the NYT: Georgia Republicans on Thursday passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limiting drop boxes and expanding the Legislature’s power over elections.
Other Republican controlled states followed, and we now have a real-world demonstration of the need for those officials in the 4th quarter. We have to be able to trust that elections, which have national consequences, are conducted with easy access, using effective, fair, equitable, consistent, non-discriminatory rules that are applied universally.
We need the Voting Rights Act restored, so we can trust the outcome of our elections and trust in the fairness of our democracy long into the future, just as we expect to see fairness in our NFL games.
