By Justin M. Loveland, Outreach Intern
Forty-nine years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. This long-overdue Act finally outlawed the worst of the Jim Crow laws, including debilitating poll taxes, literacy tests that were vaguely worded or required obscure political knowledge, or the racist Grandfather Clause that gave voting rights to those whose ancestors voted before the Civil War – white men. While the VRA symbolized a leap toward equality, last summer the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to voting rights nationwide by striking down a coverage formula used in a key part of the Act.
The formula required several specific jurisdictions with particularly heinous histories of voter discrimination to obtain approval in advance from the Department of Justice before they put any new voting practices or policies into place, and to show that these new policies would not have a discriminatory purpose or effect. Basically, this was an added layer of protection in communities where individuals have been disfranchised in the past – particularly in nine states, mostly in the South. In her dissent in the challenge to the law, Justice Ginsberg described the effectiveness of the VRA and suggested, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
However, the closely divided judicial decision does not entirely strike down the section of the Act; the Supreme Court left it up to Congress to devise a new coverage formula.
And thus, throwing the ball back, a bipartisan collection of Congress introduced the Voting Rights Amendment Act in January 2014. While the VRA listed specific states, the Amendment Act does not explicitly name them. Instead, it ensures federal oversight for any state that has discriminated in the previous 15 years in the form of a rolling preclearance formula. This new formula would require the state in question to pass all new voting propositions through a federal safeguard before they become laws, to guarantee that they are non-discriminatory.
Yet even with such protections in place, voting rights is not just an issue of the past. Continued attempts at restricting early voting in states like Florida or North Carolina where most of the early voters are African American, insisting on government-issued voter identification that would require 11% of the population to jump through another administrative hoop – these remain at the forefront of the ACLU’s concerns.
In Ohio, we’ve gone to federal court to challenge cuts to early voting. In North Carolina, we’re fighting a law that eliminates a week of early voting, ends same-day registration, and prohibits out-of-precinct voting. In Arkansas, we’re fighting against laws that require voters to present costly and hard-to-obtain IDs in order to vote. And, we continue to push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Amendment Act.
On this important anniversary, take a stand for freedom. Donate now to help the ACLU protect millions of vulnerable voters.
