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Wednesday, August 12, 2015

50 Years After the Voting Rights Act, Voting Restrictions Still Remains

Yes. I know. It is too late to post a blog about the 50th anniversary of the Voting Right Act. But I am gonna do it anyway.

Before I go into this, I will announce that I will be returning to U.S. next week. Just to prepare for the sophomore year this month there won't be second blog.

Anyway, it's been a half of century since LBJ passed the Voting Rights Act, which prevent discrimination in voting and bring equality to the ballot box for all Americans, regardless of the color of one's skin. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the Section 4 of the law, the formula laying out which jurisdictions had to seek federal approval for election law changes, which makes the Section 5 of the law - giving minorities to vote - inoperable.

Brennan Center for Justice explains the further consequences of the repeal of this part of the law:
A 5-4 majority looked at improvements in black voter registration rates and the eradication of restrictions like the poll tax to find that the "conditions that originally justified [Section 5] no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions."
In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg decried that the majority was holding the Act's own success against it. "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes," she responded, "is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
At its heart, the disagreement boils down to whether, as a nation, we still need federal protections against the possibility of racial discrimination in voting. Although we have come a long way since the 1960s, the past few years have shown that major racial divisions still exist. They may even have gotten worse since 2013, as large majorities of white and black Americans now view race relations as "generally bad," according to a recent poll.
The recent rash of discriminatory voting laws, unleashed by the Shelby County decision, does not help. States have used the court's implicit approval as justification to pass strict measures. These may not be as obviously discriminatory as literacy tests, but they similarly prevent people from voting.
For example, mere hours after the high court ruling, Texas implemented a strict photo ID law, which had previously been rejected under Section 5. That summer, the North Carolina legislature passed a sweeping law that also instituted a stringent photo ID requirement, eliminated same-day registration, and cut back on early voting.
All of these laws respond to phantom complaints of voter fraud, and all disproportionately hurt the ability of minorities to vote. In October 2014, a federal judge found 600,000 registered Texas voters do not have acceptable ID. Testimony showed African-American and Hispanic registered voters are two to four times more likely than white registered voters to lack photo ID. In North Carolina, data showed African Americans used early voting and same-day registration at much higher rates than whites.
This seems like one of those "racism is over" rationale. Part of this excuse to get rid of racial equality of this country.

Ari Berman, a journalist who have been covering voting rights throughout his career, the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby county decision made the Voting Rights Act more vulnerable. In his op-ed for New York Times, the voter IDs laws after the decision made the voting more restrictive and thousands of voters turned away from it. A 2014 study by the Government Accountability Office found that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout by 2 to 3 percent during the 2012 election, enough to swing a close vote, with the highest drop-off among young, black and newly registered voters.

That's one of the reasons why there was a low turnout during the 2014 mid-term - voting restriction laws prevented minority voters and younger voters, these same progressive-minded people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 election. The Republican Party - the party that supports the voter ID laws - wants to make the electorate older, whiter and more conservative as opposed to how the electorate was in 2008.

On the bright side, there has been some efforts to bring back the voting rights to all the people. Couple of months ago, Oregon passed the law that to automatically sign up eligible citizens in the motor vehicle database. Also, several states have advanced bipartisan reforms to modernize voter registration in recent years, and have expanded early voting opportunities and moved registration online.

Right now, the Congress has introduced two separate bills — the Voting Rights Amendment Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act — that would restore the lost protections of Section 5, making it operative once again, and modernize the Voting Rights Act for the 21st century. On this historic anniversary for our country, Congress should move swiftly to restore the lost promise of the Voting Rights Act. 

The Voting Rights Act exist not for the racial equality, but for advancing the core of democracy. 

This needs to be a major concern for everyone - no matter how they viewed the 2013 decision. This could be a major concern for 2016 election, especially for Ari Breman:
I think in many ways we've come to take the VRA and what it did for granted, but the fact that states can pass new voting restrictions, those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, no longer have to clear their election changes with the federal government means that: No. 1, those states can pass new restrictions very close to the election that are very hard to challenge, and ... No. 2, that other states are going to feel emboldened to try to pass these efforts.