July 17, 2006
A Brief History of the Voting Rights Act Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Late last week, John Steele Gordon and I debated the merits of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On Friday, the U.S. House overwhelmingly reauthorized the legislation, preserving its pre-clearance sections and requiring jurisdictions with high numbers of non-English speakers to offer interpreters and foreign-language ballots to registered voters.
Mr. Gordon accused me of displaying an anti-Southern bias and specifically cited my support of the legislation’s pre-clearance provisions, which require certain states or counties to gain Justice Department approval of any changes to their election laws. In my original post, and in my reply to Mr. Gordon, I went out of my way to emphasize the national, not regional, importance of the VRA. Let me elaborate.
In addition to its strong regulations governing voter registration and participation, the original legislation suspended literacy tests and other devices meant to suppress the vote in Southern states or parts of states where less than 50 percent of the eligible adult population cast ballots in 1964; further, it required such jurisdictions to pre-clear changes in their election laws with the Department of Justice. Under these guidelines, the bill originally applied such standards to Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, and to certain counties in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, and North Carolina. Note that Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, and Alaska are not Southern states.
The original 1965 VRA was due to expire in 1970. That year Congress passed (and Richard Nixon signed) a five-year reauthorization bill. It imposed on the rest of the country the same standards, using voter turnout in 1968 as the new benchmark. Because of the new trigger, four additional non-Southern counties—Apache County, Arizona; Imperial County, California; Kings County, New York (Brooklyn); and New York County, New York (Manhattan)—fell under the pre-clearance section. The 1970 legislation also temporarily banned literacy tests nationwide.
In 1975 Congress again reauthorized the VRA, strengthening it with new sections that extended pre-clearance requirements to jurisdictions with large numbers of unregistered “language minorities” (e.g., Spanish speakers, many of whom were naturalized citizens or native-born citizens from Puerto Rico). The 1975 reauthorization also permanently banned literacy tests nationwide. The VRA was reauthorized again in 1982.
Because of the 1970 and 1975 reauthorization bills, which were passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by two Republican Presidents, the VRA’s pre-clearance section ultimately affected (or still affects) four counties in California; three counties in New York; two counties in South Dakota; two townships in Michigan; ten counties in New Hampshire; and parts of the South, including several counties in Florida. The extended scope of the VRA after 1970 also introduced federal election examiners in all or part of Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington State. Which is to say, the VRA does not target, and for most of its lifetime has not targeted, the South. It is national in scope.
Furthermore, as I pointed out last week, states, counties, and municipalities that fall under the VRA’s pre-clearance provisions can petition the federal courts for “bailout,” meaning release from pre-clearance regulations. If a jurisdiction can prove to a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia that over the preceding 10 years it has met certain fundamental conditions (detailed here on the DOJ’s website), then it can be released from pre-clearance. Several parts of Virginia and several northern jurisdictions have succeeded in earning bailouts from the D.C. District Court.
So to Mr. Gordon’s charge that I harbor some terrible bias against the South, simply because I oppose the attempts of some conservative Republicans to water down the VRA, I would respond that the VRA does not single out any one section of the country. If the South has borne a disproportionate share of the VRA’s burdens, that is only because the South has historically been the prime offender in curtailing the voting rights of American citizens. But it hasn’t been the only offender, and the VRA is an important national corrective to a problem with which we sadly continue to live.
Finally, a minor correction: in discussing Lester Maddox, the arch-segregationist who served as Georgia’s governor from 1967 to 1971, I wrote, “Maddox actually out-polled his GOP opponent, Rep. Bo Callaway...” What I meant to say was that Maddox was out-polled by Calloway. Because Callaway won a plurality but not an outright majority of the votes cast, the election was thrown to the state legislature, which chose Maddox. My point remains the same. Both Maddox and Callaway were staunch segregationists.
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