Mary Orndorff Troyan

Gannett Washington Bureau

Proposal would update old pre-clearance provision

Supreme Court case originated in Alabama

Civil rights groups call legislation %22bold step%22 for minority voting rights

WASHINGTON — A proposal to revive a law that required certain states to prove their election procedures weren't discriminatory would not immediately affect some Deep South states with a history of suppressing minority voting.

Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., introduced legislation Thursday that would breathe new life into the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court partially struck down last year.

In a case brought by Shelby County, Ala., the justices threw out the four-decade-old formula that had determined which states had to get federal permission — or pre-clearance — before making any changes affecting voting or elections. The formula targeted all or parts of 15 states with a long history of disenfranchising minority voters.

Under the new proposal, which has a long way to go before becoming law, only states with at least five voting-rights violations in the last 15 years would be subject to pre-clearance, and one of them would have to be a statewide violation.

States that would immediately be covered include Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, Sensenbrenner said. Each of those states has had at least one statewide violation of the Voting Rights Act in the last 15 years.

The previous formula used voting data from the 1970s, leading the Supreme Court to declare it outdated and unconstitutional.

But the court's ruling left open the possibility Congress would update the formula with newer data and revive strict oversight on jurisdictions with a persistent and more recent record of discrimination.

Under the bill, any state that reached the five-violations-in-15-years threshold would be added to the list for extra federal supervision.

The bill also would make the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act a national policy, not one that applied only to states where discrimination was most blatant in the 1960s.

The lawmakers called it an imperfect but solid compromise that already is attracting bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. In addition to Sensenbrenner, Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama is co-sponsoring the legislation. The Senate version does not yet have any GOP co-sponsors.

"This bill modernizes the Voting Rights Act and restores those protections that were gutted by the court to ensure every citizen has an equal opportunity to participate in our democracy," Sensenbrenner said in a press conference on Capitol Hill. Also attending were Conyers, Leahy, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.

Civil rights groups that had worked to preserve the old formula said the legislation is a step toward restoring some protections for minority voters. Pre-clearance, which Congress created and maintained for nearly a half-century before the court decision, was designed to block discriminatory practices before they affect voters.

States, cities and counties under the formula had to submit proposed election changes — such as moving a polling place or redrawing district boundaries — to the U.S. Justice Department or a federal court for review before they could be implemented.

"Millions of voters of color were made even more vulnerable to racial discrimination by the Supreme Court's devastating ruling," said Ryan Haygood, director of the Political Participation Group of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "Today, less than a year after that shameful ruling, Congress took a bold step toward restoring our nation's discrimination checkpoint, and helping to ensure that voters of color have full, equal, and active access to ballot box, the fundamental right that is preservative of all other rights."

Elected officials in some Southern states had complained in recent years that pre-clearance was burdensome and was based on the unfair presumption they were prone to discrimination.

The lawmakers who negotiated the proposal, which would amend the 1965 Voting Rights Act, said they tried to create a formula that was both constitutional and politically acceptable to Democrats and Republicans.

"I think we've threaded that needle," Sensenbrenner said.

In addition to the five-violations-in-15 years standard, the proposal would narrow the original formula in other ways. A state voter ID law that ran afoul of the voting rights law would not count as an infraction. And states that went 15 years without a violation would be automatically freed from the pre-clearance requirement.

But in other ways, the proposal would broaden the Voting Rights Act. For example, it would allow a federal judge or the Justice Department to put a state or local government under pre-clearance for violations that are unintentionally discriminatory.

And it would require all jurisdictions to publicly disclose all voting-related changes well before elections. A local city or county also could be subject to pre-clearance for three violations in 15 years, or one violation coupled with extremely low minority voter turnout.

"It is amazing to me, unbelievable, almost unreal that we were able to come together so quickly to craft a compromise that Democrats and Republicans can find a way to support and move forward," said Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who was born in Alabama. "Voting is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a Democratic society."