USA: Voting Rights Act is 50 Years Old, voter rights and democracy still under threat

By Jon Queally

On the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, proponents of the landmark legislation are saying the law not only deserves to be celebrated for its historic achievements but must also be defended from an ongoing and coordinated attack against the principles it embodies.

Across the United States on Thursday – including at a rally in Washington, D.C. at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial – an array of civil rights advocates, lawmakers, historians, and progressive voices championed the importance of the Voting Rights Act as they issued a warning that its bedrock principles of voter access and racial justice are under direct assault by forces seeking political gain by subverting democracy, preventing voter registration, and keeping people from the polls.

As Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who marched alongside King and was present when the then U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law, said in a tweet on Thursday, “Our vote is the foundation of democracy. A just and fair society requires the removal of any and all barriers to the ballot box.”

Signed in to law on August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act is widely considered – alongside the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – one of the key achievements of the movement for racial and social justice which shook the established order in the early 1960s. However, half a century later, those who cherish what the law was able to achieve say those gains are now under serious threat.

Central to the current debate about voting rights are two concurrent developments. First, a slew of state laws passed in recent years – almost exclusively by Republican-controlled legislatures – have imposed new burdens on voters that are disproportionately and negatively impacting minority voters, the elderly, young students, and other vulnerable populations like the poor and disabled. And second, a widely criticized 2013 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, known as Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key provisions contained in the Voting Rights Act itself. That decision, critics say, has acted as endorsement for further voter restrictions, especially in southern states freed from federal oversight previously mandated by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Julie Ebenstein, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, explained to the Huffington Post how before Section 5 was struck down states were compelled “to show that laws are not discriminatory before they implement them, but now we have a situation where plaintiffs need to show that laws are discriminatory and are sprinting to do that before people’s rights are violated in an election.”

And as Theodore M. Shaw, former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and currently a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law, explained in a blog post this week, the issue “boils down to whether, as a nation, we still need federal protections against the possibility of racial discrimination in voting.” Shaw continues:

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.

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 2 – 4 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.

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