Times have changed, but bias at the polls remains.
Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal officials trying to stamp out racially discriminatory voting laws in states such as Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi were caught in a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. As soon as one discriminatory law was struck down, another would quickly pop up.
The 1965 law was Congress' fourth try within a decade to end that dodge, and it worked. The new law's controversial Section 5 listed the states, counties or other jurisdictions with the worst history of discrimination at the polls. It required that any change to their voting laws be cleared in advance with the Justice Department or the federal district court in Washington, D.C.
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The effect over time was dramatic. Voter registration and political representation for blacks, Latinos and Native Americans in states covered by Section 5 grew substantially. To make sure that progress would continue, Congress repeatedly reauthorized the 1965 Act, along with its pre-clearance requirement for parts or all of 16 states, most recently in 2006.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether things have improved enough that pre-clearance is no longer needed, and therefore an unconstitutional burden on the covered states.
The answer is no. The requirement should stand.
The 15th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to make sure no U.S. citizen could be denied the vote, was clear in giving Congress the power to enforce that right "by appropriate legislation." Before the law was renewed in 2006, the House and Senate held 21 hearings over 10 months to determine whether pre-clearance was still necessary.
Although the Supreme Court let pre-clearance stand in a 2009 case, the justices said that "things have changed in the South," and that the Voting Rights Act "imposes current burdens (that) must be justified by current needs."
Yes, the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow era have disappeared. But subtler forms of bias, such as redrawing district boundaries and moving polls to inconvenient locations, remain.
The latest challenge to pre-clearance comes from Shelby County, Ala., where, as recently as 2008, the Justice Department reversed a proposed voting change on the grounds that it discriminated against black voters.
Two lower court decisions rejected Shelby County's challenge before it got to the Supreme Court. After thoroughly reviewing the record, the federal appeals court for Washington, D.C., concluded that "overt racial discrimination persists in covered jurisdictions."
It's not that other states don't enact discriminatory voting changes, or that there aren't ways to fight discrimination besides pre-clearance. The Voting Rights Act allows lawsuits after changes have been enacted, but those often come after elections that deprive minority voters of their rights.
The law also lets covered jurisdictions bail out of coverage if they can show a clean record for 10 years. Federal courts can also "bail in" jurisdictions that are found to be discriminating against minority voters.
Those bail-out and bail-in provisions make the law flexible enough to stop punishing jurisdictions that have cleaned up their acts while subjecting new violators to strict monitoring. That's fair, and the high court would do well to leave the law intact.
Your state covered?
The Voting Rights Act applies special provisions to all or part of 16 states:
Source Department of Justice