On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law with Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and other civil rights leaders in attendance. The Act outlawed the voting practices that had been responsible for the disenfranchisement of black people in the U.S. in general, and the South in particular, since the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Section 4(b) of the Act requires that states with a history of voter discrimination needed to submit to federal review any policies or changes affecting voting without first getting clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice. The federal judicial review is known as "preclearance."
Any state where less than 50 percent of the population was registered to vote in 1964 required preclearance. Under this definition, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota are obliged to submit to preclearance by the U.S. Department of Justice. At the end of a redistricting process, for example, the covered state must submit its maps to the DOJ and demonstrate "that the proposed voting change does not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group," Additionally, the proposed boundaries may not have a retrogressive effect on the ability of minority groups to elect "their preferred candidates of choice."
Congress has renewed and amended the Voting Rights Act four times since 1965, most recently in 2006, when President George W. Bush signed into law a 25-year extension of the act.
On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Act, with its formula for requiring preclearance, as unconstitutional based on current conditions. The court stated that preclearance is no longer necessary. Preclearance itself was not struck down, but it currently has no effect unless Congress passes a new formula. Here is the text of Shelby County v. Holder
Within hours of the Supreme Court ruling, the states of Mississippi and Texas announced that their voter identification laws were in immediate effect.
The Court's ruling means that non white people in Mississippi and Texas have lost equal access to exercising the right to vote. So have all the non white people everywhere in the USA where money and malice combine against the guarantee of one person one vote, in an attempt to suppress citizens' votes for Democrats. According to Greg Palast,
"the GOP majority knew they were handicapping the next presidential run by a good 6 million votes. (That's the calculation that RFK and I came up with for racially bent vote loss in 2004 - and the GOP will pick up at least that in the next run.)"
"... largely because of the Voting Rights Act," Justice Roberts wrote in the Opinion, "voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers."
Justice Roberts also quoted himself from his previous majority opinion in 2009. "Things have changed in the South," he wrote. "Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels."
Roberts admits that Section 4 was constitutional when the Voting Rights Act first passed but that its decades-old data and eradicated practices must be reassessed in light of current conditions.
But Justice Roberts is wrong on the facts. "Disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased" is factually not correct. If African-Americans (and American Indians, and Hispanic Americans) have appeared in record numbers due to the Voting Rights Act, then eradicating disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race would result in even more minority office holders being elected to office. But in fact, the opposite is happening. Voter suppression and voter segregation have made a major return since the election of 2010, according to a statistical analysis done by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
Their analysis shows that in the South, black voters and elected officials have less influence than at any time since the civil rights era, and conservative whites control all the power in the region, using their lock to pass legislation hostile to non-white people in health care, education, and criminal justice policy.
Following the election of President Barack Obama, many
political observers - especially conservative ones - suggested that the United States is now a post-racial society. Three years later, in the region of the country where most African Americans live, the South, there is strong statistical evidence that politics is resegregating, with African Americans once again excluded from power and representation. Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era. And since conservative whites control all the power in the region, they are enacting legislation both neglectful of the needs of African Americans and other communities of color (in health care, in education, in criminal justice policy) as well as outright hostile to them, as in the assault on voting rights through photo identification laws and other means.
The Resegregation of Politics
The 2010 U.S. Census
figures show the significance of the changes taking place. Texas is now a majority-minority state; 55% of the population is non white. Hispanics make up only
20% of the electorate. In the 2008 presidential election, the Republican candidate won by a margin of 11.8%. Similarly unrepresentative, Mississippi's population is 42% non white. In the 2008 presidential election, the Republican candidate won by a 13.2% margin of victory.
Harvard Kennedy School's Stirling professor of history and social policy Alexander Keyssar has also written about the return of voter suppression. Writing
in the summer of 2012, he described the impact of voter ID laws on the targeted groups.
Who are these men and women? Studies indicate that they are disproportionately young or elderly, poor, black, and Hispanic; demographically, they are more likely than not to vote Democratic. The number of people potentially affected is considerable: the Texas secretary of state, for example, estimates that at least 600,000 already registered voters do not possess the documents to cast ballots in November. New York University's respected Brennan Center for Justice has estimated that a total of more than five million people may lack the requisite identification documents in states that have passed new ID laws.
Justice Roberts also overlooked or ignored outright confessions, court cases, and years of evidence of intentional voter suppression, voter repression, and attempts by Republican party operatives and planners to deprive citizens who were likely to vote Democratic of the ability to vote.
On November 25, 2012, the Palm Beach Post reported that the former GOP chair and governor admitted that Florida's new election laws were intended to suppress Democratic votes, not to address the stated concern about vote fraud.
Florida Republicans Admit Voter Suppression Was The Goal Of New Election Laws
By Aviva Shen on Nov 26, 2012 at 9:53 am
In an exclusive report by the Palm Beach Post, several prominent Florida Republicans are now admitting that these election law changes were geared toward suppressing minority and Democratic votes.
Former governor Charlie Crist (R-FL) and former GOP chairman Jim Greer (R-FL), as well as several current GOP members, told the Post that Republican consultants pushed the new measures as a way to suppress Democratic voters. Crist expanded early voting hours in 2008 despite party pressure, but Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) targeted early voting almost immediately when he took office in 2011. Scott's administration claimed the new laws were meant to curb in-person voter fraud, despite the fact that an individual in Florida is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.
This DKos
diary lists examples of voter suppression from 2000 through 2004.
This article describes the top ten voter suppression events from 2012.
These are at least a dozen more articles about 2012 voter suppression from the New York Times, Bloomberg News, the Washington Post, and other reputable media.
Where was the Department of Justice?
If the Department of Justice is supposed to pre-clear covered jurisdictions' redistricting maps, voter registration laws, and other acts that will affect minority voters, what has the DOJ been doing? In 2006, the United States Commission on Civil Rights reviewed the Justice Department Preclearance record and found that the percentage of DOJ objections to submitted changes has declined markedly throughout the 40-year period of the Act: from 5.5 percent in the first period to 1.2 percent in the second, and to 0.6 percent in the third. Over the 10 years prior to the review, the overall objection rate was so low as to be practically negligible, at less than 0.1 percent. The Commission's two Democratic members dissented from the report, charging that the Commission had "abandon[ed] the field of battle."
What's Next
The Court did not rule that preclearance standards are unconstitutional. It ruled that the standards Congress adopted in 2006 are no longer Constitutional. This means that Congress must replace them.
"It is up to Congress to right the wrong of this decision and ensure that we do not turn back the clock on Americaâs democratic progress," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in an official response to the ruling. "The Senate will act. I have asked Chairman Leahy to immediately examine the appropriate path for the Senate to address this decision."
The question is whether the House GOP believes that voter suppression will be strong enough in 2014 to grant them immunity from voter backlash today.