July 13, 2006
More on the Voting Rights Act Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:20 PM EST As luck would have it, I was listening to NPR this afternoon and learned something I probably should have known already: today the House of Representatives is voting on—and is expected to pass—the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. So my earlier post was (unknowingly) more relevant than it claimed to be.
The provisions to which some—not all—Republican members of Congress object are both the pre-clearance section of the original legislation and new language stipulating that areas with high concentrations of non-English speakers provide interpreters and foreign-language ballots. According to NPR’s coverage, House GOP leaders have agreed to a series of floor votes on these items, as well as a vote to reauthorize the legislation for 10 rather than 25 years, in an effort to placate their Southern caucus and their right wing. NPR further suggests that the leadership expects and hopes that its Southern caucus will lose these votes, and that the bill will pass intact. The party has enough problems as it is this year—particularly with immigrant voters—without identifying itself as somehow opposed to voting rights.
On the subject of the pre-clearance clause, a good example of the lasting importance of the VRA is Kilmichael, Mississippi, a small town whose population hovers between 800 and 900. In 2001, in an effort to forestall the likely election of the town’s first black mayor and council, the town’s all-white board of aldermen canceled a regularly scheduled election three weeks out. The aldermen claimed that the delay was needed in order to switch from an at-large system to a district system.
Readers may recall that in my earlier post I cited the opposite move as the more frequent device by which white elected officials dilute the black vote. But in Kilmichael, the white population seems to have been on the decline. In such a case, the at-large system works against white interests. The point is not that either system is more democratic than the other; it is simply that white Southerners—and, to be fair, whites in many Northern and Western locales, as well—have a sordid history of switching systems in order to maximize their own clout and minimize the effectiveness of black votes.
In this particular instance, the Bush Justice Department found the cancellation of the election and the proposed procedural changes in violation of the VRA. Consequently a special election was held, and the town voted in its first black mayor.
It’s worth noting that career officials in the civil rights division of the Justice Department also strongly objected to Georgia’s mandatory photo ID law; in an unusual move, they were overruled by Bush administration appointees who hold the ranking administrative posts within the department.
Stay tuned for today’s vote.
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