The rights of minority voters are not fair game in partisan battles, the author writes. GOP war on Voting Rights Act

In 2006, Congress reauthorized Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act with nearly unanimous Republican support. In 2012, Republican officials declared war on minority voting and have challenged the constitutionality of Section 5 — which requires states and localities with egregious histories of voting discrimination to seek federal approval before making any election changes — in multiple court cases. What happened?

Consider: Republican support among African-Americans for presidential nominee Mitt Romney finally hit zero in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and the GOP’s strength among Latino voters is nearly as anemic. These numbers make minority voters, sadly, irresistible targets for Republican vote suppression efforts. Legal battles over when ballots can be cast and whose votes will be counted, The New York Times reported Monday, could substantially affect the outcome of 2012 elections.


In many states, only the Voting Rights Act is standing in the GOP’s way. Rather than showing respect for the voting rights of minorities and winning their votes with appealing policies, Republicans appear to have instead decided to try to expel them from the electorate and attack the biggest legal obstacle to their expulsion — the Voting Rights Act.

The rights of minority voters, however, are not fair game in partisan battles. Partisanship must not be allowed to trump equal opportunity in voting. Republicans have whipped up a phony frenzy over the extent of voter fraud to justify their assault on minority voters.

Rather than working overtime to stir up fears, they should join in efforts to broaden the franchise to include as many Americans as possible. The true scandal in our electoral process is our shockingly low turnout level. Nearly every other advanced democracy has higher voter participation. Yet we now have one political party working mightily to reduce that turnout through unwarranted restrictions that disproportionately burden minority voters.

The math is simple. The Voting Rights Act increases the number and effectiveness of minority voters. And minority voters now overwhelmingly support Democrats. President Barack Obama’s support among African-Americans has reached 94 percent. Latinos have voted increasingly Democratic since California Gov. Pete Wilson launched the GOP’s war against undocumented immigrants with Proposition 187 in 1994. The Republicans’ current hard-line immigration policies have only advanced this trend. Reduce the minority vote and Republicans improve their chances of winning.

This shameful calculation has been embraced by the party of Lincoln. Republicans in state legislatures have produced a flurry of photo ID laws, discriminatory redistrictings, restrictions on registration, cutbacks on early voting, reinstatement of strict felon disfranchisement rules and erroneous purges of voter lists.

Republicans have now turned their backs on the powerful moral imperative that animated the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and produced overwhelming bipartisan majorities for renewal of Section 5 as recently as 2006. In the interest of winning elections at any cost, Republicans are trying to take back the vote from the most vulnerable in our society.

Since its passage in 1965, the Voting Rights Act’s explicit goal has been to empower minorities by ensuring that they have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice.

The real partisan implications were less clear when the act passed. In fact, Democrats seemed the likely losers. Southern whites fled the party of their forebears and into the arms of a Republican Party that promised to protect them from the advance of civil rights. President Lyndon B. Johnson famously said, as he signed the bill, that he was delivering the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.

Section 5 was designed to address the insidious creativity of Jim Crow jurisdictions in devising ways to stay one step ahead of enforcers of the 15th Amendment, the post-Civil War amendment that prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Congress decided that it was necessary for covered jurisdictions — those with the worst histories of discrimination — to pre-clear their voting changes by proving to the attorney general or a three-judge Washington court that they did not have the purpose or effect of discriminating against minority voters.

Events during recent weeks have confirmed why Section 5 remains essential. A three-judge court denied preclearance to Texas’s redistricting of its congressional, state Senate and state House districts — explicitly finding that the Legislature drew congressional and Senate lines with the intent to dilute the strength of minority voters. A separate three-judge court two days later refused to pre-clear Texas’s draconian, and transparently discriminatory, requirement that voters produce a photo ID prescribed by the state. The court found that the photo ID requirement would fall most heavily on poor voters, who are disproportionately minorities.

A three-judge court had previously denied preclearance of Florida’s effort to restrict early voting, including the Sunday before the election. Early and Sunday voters in Florida have been disproportionately minorities. South Carolina’s photo ID requirement is pending before another three-judge court.

Because Section 5 is successfully frustrating Republican efforts in covered states to shape the electorate by slicing off pockets of noncompliant minority voters, it looks as if Republican-led jurisdictions have now set their sights on eliminating Section 5.

Covered jurisdictions have included constitutional challenges to the law in their pre-clearance actions and in separate lawsuits. Though the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently reaffirmed Section 5’s constitutionality, that case is likely to be heard by the Supreme Court. And other challenges are in the pipeline.

Ironically, the Republican drive to exclude minority voters could boomerang. The principal basis for the constitutional challenges to Section 5 is that it is no longer necessary. Covered jurisdictions argue that they have reformed and there is now no reason for requiring them to pre-clear election changes with the federal government. You can trust us to treat minority voters equally, they contend.

Yet, as courts have confirmed, these states’ recent efforts demonstrate persistent intent to roll back the clock by diminishing the impact of minority voters. These are the very type of practices that produced Section 5 in 1965. They remain reprehensible in 2012 and they undermine any suggestion that Section 5 has outlived its need.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who as a freedom rider was beaten by white mobs, reminded the delegates last week at the Democratic National Convention that the right of minority citizens to vote was secured through a moral crusade. It succeeded because of the heroism of people like Lewis, who also survived the bloody attack by Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Lewis expressed incredulity that GOP officials are trying to take away that hard-won vote, describing it as “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.” He hearkened back to the time when people “had to pass a literacy test, pay a poll tax,” and recounted that would-be African-American voters were required “to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap.”

This victory won by men and women of extraordinary moral vision and physical courage, such as Lewis, must not fall victim to the GOP’s narrow partisan interests.

William Yeomans served as Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as a Justice Department official. He is a fellow in law and government at American University College of Law.

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