The other day Hillary Clinton blamed her 2016 loss to Trump on voter suppression due to the repeal of part of the Voting Rights Act, using Wisconsin as her main example:
“I was the first person who ran for president without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and I will tell you, it makes a really big difference. And it doesn’t just make a difference in Alabama and Georgia; it made a difference in Wisconsin, where the best studies that have been done said somewhere between 40 [thousand] and 80,000 people were turned away from the polls because of the color of their skin, because of their age, because of whatever excuse could be made up to stop a fellow American citizen from voting.”
— Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, at the annual “Bloody Sunday” commemorative service, Selma, Ala., March 3, 2019
According to the Washington Post, she also said this:
“Just think about it: Between 2012, the prior presidential election where we still had the Voting Rights Act, and 2016, when my name was on the ballot, there were fewer voters registered in Georgia than there had been those prior four years.”
— Clinton
But the Washington Post fact checker said Clinton isn’t telling the truth. First of all, they point out that the Voting Rights Act repeal had NOTHING to do with Wisconsin (h/t: Free Beacon):
In 2013, the Supreme Court in a 5-to-4 decision struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. This section of the law was designed to safeguard minority voters’ rights in places where they historically had faced discrimination at the polls. The law required nine states and several counties to seek authorization from the federal government before making changes to their election procedures…
Wisconsin was not one of the states covered by Section 4 when the court ruled in 2013, so, right off the bat, Clinton’s claim that this “made a difference in Wisconsin” is unfounded.
They also said her claims about Georgia were false as well:
Georgia was covered by Section 4, but Clinton’s claim that total voter registration declined in that state from 2012 to 2016 is false; it increased.
They go on to analyze Hillary’s substantiations of these numbers, including studies that analyzed the effects of the Voter ID law that was passed in Wisconsin. In one instance they found that Mother Jones misrepresented a study of registered voters staying home over lack of a qualifying idea in just two counties, extrapolating it statewide. The study specifically says that you can’t extrapolate it statewide, but they did.
But even so, WAPO still hit Hillary for not double checking her facts:
The Mother Jones article may have given Clinton a mistaken impression, but we always warn politicians: You are responsible for the claims you make, so double check the facts. We also told Merrill what Mayer said and didn’t get a response.
WAPO goes in depth as to why Clinton is misrepresenting the facts and you can read more about that here.