Sure, the election is over, but the fight over the Voting Rights Act, the most important piece of civil-rights legislation ever passed, is just beginning. The Supreme Court is set to reconsider Section 5 of the VRA, which says that states with a history of finding creative ways to disenfranchise minorities have to clear their election-law changes with the DoJ or with Federal Courts. Naturally, this frustrates Republicans like George Will, who thinks preclearance is no longer needed.
That year, because they had used many tactics to suppress voting by blacks, six states and some jurisdictions in other states were required to seek permission -- "pre-clearance" -- from the Justice Department for even minor changes in voting procedures. In 1975, the act was extended to cover Texas and two other states. The act's "bailout" provision, which ostensibly provides a path by which jurisdictions can end federal supervision, is so burdensome as to be often unusable. The pre-clearance requirements, which were originally intended to exist for five years, have been extended four times, most recently in 2006 -- for 25 years. The Senate voted the extension to 2031 unanimously, which is evidence that genuflection had replaced reflection.
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Speaking of which, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom -- she of the Manhattan Institute, he a Harvard historian -- say that Barack Obama's election demonstrates that another facet of the Voting Rights Act has lost its original, and even then spurious, rationale. Because "it is no longer possible to argue that racial identity is an insurmountable barrier to the highest office in the land" and because "there are no longer any meaningful racial barriers to voting or holding office in America," it is time to end the unseemly practice of racial gerrymandering to produce "majority minority" legislative districts to guarantee the election of minority candidates.
A few things come to mind after reading this, one is that for all the accusations that liberals viewed voting for Obama as an attempt to "purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap," as Obama himself put it, it's conservatives who have been touting Obama's victory as proof that racism no longer exists. Second, when Congress reconsidered the VRA in 2006, they heard testimony from dozens of people on both sides of the issue, and a Republican Congress and a Republican president renewed it. Why? Because there were ample instances of attempted changes to election laws to disenfranchise black voters. Presidential elections are a poor barometer for looking at such things. The changes in election laws local jurisdictions make to dilute black voting power -- such as randomly changing election dates or moving polling places, changing elected positions to appointed positions, adding seats to governing bodies from white districts when blacks win victories -- are all off the national radar.
The truth is that the argument over the VRA is a partisan one. Voting Rights groups kicked the GOP all over the map this year by being prepared to litigate all over the country. By winning many of these cases, they helped people get to the polls who might not be able to -- often poor, working class, black, Latino, or women voters. In other words, likely Democratic voters. These groups filled the role the the civil rights division was unwilling to. But they avoided lots of costly litigation in the South because preclearance prevented a lot of dirty tricks on behalf of partisan election officials. With Section 5 gone, Republicans in their Southern strongholds will be free to hamper voter access as much as they want to. Which is why Republicans are so eager to get rid of it.
-- A. Serwer
