A few days ago I wrote about the attempts by the Justice Department to force  the city of Kinston, North Carolina to label candidates by party affiliation. The Justice Department adopted a paternalistic (and insulting) rationale when they justified their action as being necessary to insure that African-Americans can elect candidates of their choice - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and are almost exclusively African-American.

The department ruled that white voters will only vote for African-Americans if they are Democrats and that the city cannot eliminate party affiliations on the ballot because that would violate African-American voters' right to elect candidates (presumably African-American) that they want.   (my colleague, Clarice Feldman, also has an article on the controversy).

The facts are: African-Americans are a majority of registered voters in the heavily Democratic community but low voter turnout often makes them a minority of actual voters on election day. Hence, the need to put a thumb on the scale of justice to help African-American and Democrat candidates to win.

But  low voter turnout is not set in stone. After all, African-Americans turned out in droves in Kinston to elect Barack Obama.   But, generally, apathy is the rule when it comes to turnout among African-Americans. Why?

Abigail Thernstrom suggests an answer: gerrymandering to ensure African-American majority districts leads to apathy and low voter turnout. She writes in NRO's The Corner:

Vanderbilt University law professor Carol Swain found that turnout in black-majority congressional districts across the country was especially low. She noted, for example, that just 13 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls in 1986 in Major Owens's 78-percent black district in New York City. If voters in Owens's district felt more empowered with a black man representing them in Washington, it certainly did not inspire many of them to bother to vote.

James E. Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Buffalo, has supported Swain's findings. Campbell found that in 1994, more than 60 percent of congressional districts in which minorities were the majority ranked in the bottom quintile in levels of voter turnout. Other scholars have looked at the data and come to the same conclusion.

The low-voter-turnout point applies to both black-designer districts and black-majority cities and towns. Places like Kinston are not the creation of an overly intrusive Justice Department; nevertheless, since the DOJ used low black voter turnout as the excuse for rejecting the nonpartisan-voting proposal, it is worth noting the similarity in voting-participation patterns in majority-black towns and artificially created majority-black districts. In both settings, black political apathy should tell the Justice Department to keep out. The DOJ is acting aggressively to remedy an alleged wrong that has nothing to do with discrimination.