Let’s Look at the Issues

In last year’s presidential election thousands and thousands of people in minority communities in Florida had to wait in line for up to 14 hours to vote. It had been noted earlier that a good way to combat crowding at the polls is by allowing early voting. But election commissions in a number of African-American communities in Florida and other states scrapped early voting and this action brought the expected result of long lines and frustrated voters going home without casting their ballots. Voting machines didn’t work in more than a few minority precincts in two other states, burdensome voter ID laws were attempted in a number of other areas of the country, attempts were made to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters from the eligible voter rolls in several other states and still other areas relocated polls without notifying eligible voters.

This week, the Supreme Court struck down the section of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 that makes changes in voting procedures in certain states and individual counties subject to immediate legal review and mandatory rectification. The Court said Congress was always free to address any voter suppression through legislation.

As we have noted before, there are many older members of our Union who will no doubt recall the tremendous struggle 50 years ago to get the Voting Rights Act passed into law. People were beaten, attacked by police dogs and even killed in the fight to pass this effective legislation. It is a sacred law, a statute that is designed to afford all U.S. citizens the right to vote regardless of their race, religion, language or income. It is a law that has worked. It
has been successfully enforced hundreds of times over the years, allowing millions— yes, millions — of citizens to vote on occasions when they might otherwise not have had that opportunity.

The section of the Voting Rights Act that was struck down by the Supreme Court was the very vehicle for enforcing the anti-discrimination provisions of the law. Under this section of the Voting Rights
Act, certain states and more than 50 local jurisdictions in the U.S. that have had a history of discrimination at the polls were required to get clearance from the U.S. Justice Department or a special court in Washington before changing voting rules. Under a reauthorization action by Congress in 2006, nine states fell under this section of the law, as well as 52 individual counties in the U.S. And while seven of the nine states are located in the South, it should be noted that Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan were among the counties where the law was applied. In fact, the law was applied in Manhattan fairly recently when city officials tried to close a longtime Chinatown polling place and relocate it elsewhere without
giving adequate notification to the Chinese speaking population in the community.

Needless to say, the Supreme Court’s ruling was by a 5-4 majority, with the five conservative justices voting to strike down this section of the Voting Rights Act.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the conservative majority on the court, said the country has changed so much in the last 50 years the enforcement section of the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary. Roberts’ writing brought to mind the hearing on the Voting Rights Act that was held before the Supreme Court earlier this year. In that hearing Chief Justice Roberts had a question for U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was representing the Obama administration’s determined defense of the Voting Rights Act.

“Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American turnout?” Roberts asked Verrilli, who confessed that he did not know the answer.

“It’s Massachusetts,” Roberts said, in an effort to prove his point that states like Mississippi and Florida had become less discriminatory than a deeply blue state like Massachussetts.

Only it turns out Justice Roberts was wrong. In fact, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin and other Bay State leaders publicly disagreed with Roberts. “We have one of the highest voter registrations in the country,” Galvin said. “The concept of black communities in Massachusetts not voting is an old slur, and it’s not true.” But it was Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia’s comments during the same hearing that were even more disturbing. He said the congressional reauthorization of this section of the Voting Rights Act was “very likely attributable to a phenomenon called perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Yes, he really said that!

When the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized by Congress in 2006, it passed in the House by a vote of 390 to 33 and it passed in the Senate unanimously. This was not because of perpetuation of a racial entitlement it was due to the clear recognition that there are problems in certain areas of the country when it comes to enforcing the right to vote. Today, with the extremely partisan Congress that we now have, it is extremely unlikely that there will be any legislation to undo the damage of the Supreme Court’s ruling this week. And that is very sad news for our country