Texas: We Only Hate Democrats, Not Minorities | Bloomberg

The State of Texas this week filed a rather impolite response to the voting-rights concerns recently expressed by Attorney General Eric Holder. Last month, Holder announced that the Justice Department would deploy a little-used section of the Voting Rights Act to impose federal oversight on some jurisdictions that had been freed, courtesy of a 5-4 conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, from having to “preclear” changes to voting rights (and redistricted election maps) with either a federal court or the Justice Department. Texas is precisely the kind of jurisdiction the Justice Department had in mind. In 2011, Republicans in the state legislature produced redistricting maps that, according to the federal court, had been designed with “discriminatory purpose.” The result was a significant dilution of Hispanic voting power. In a response filed with a three-judge panel in San Antonio, State Attorney General (and Republican gubernatorial candidate) Greg Abbott more or less told the Justice Department what it could do with a Texas longhorn.

Texas: Texas on voting rights: It’s not about race, just politics | MSNBC

Texas didn’t discriminate against minority voters. It was only because they were Democrats. And even if it did, the racial discrimination Texas engaged in is nowhere near as bad as the stuff that happened in the 1960s. These are some of the arguments the state of Texas is making in an attempt to stave off federal supervision of its election laws. In late July, citing the state’s recent history of discrimination, the Justice Department asked a federal court to place the entire state back under “preclearance.” That means the state would have to submit its election law changes in advance to the Justice Department, which would ensure Texas wasn’t disenfranchising voters on the basis of race. This week, Texas submitted a brief arguing that placing the state back under preclearance would be an “extreme” encroachment on state sovereignty and denying that they ever discriminated against minority voters in the state. “I don’t think it’s going to work, frankly. The mere desire to achieve partisan advantage does not give Texas a free hand to engage in racial discrimination,” says Brenda Wright, a voting law expert with the liberal think tank Demos. “If the only way you can protect white incumbents is by diluting the voting strength of Hispanic citizens, you are engaging in intentional racial discrimination, and the courts will see that.”

Editorials: What have Wisconsinites done to deserve voter suppression? | GazetteXtra

The U.S. Supreme Court in June gutted key components of the Voting Rights Act, which became law on Aug. 6, 1965. Before the ink was dry on the high court’s ruling, several states announced they will implement restrictive laws that have been on hold or introduce new voting restrictions. Wisconsin was not covered by the voting act’s “preclearance” requirements, which now cannot be enforced until Congress acts to update the law. However, we have had our share of unneeded and unfair voting laws proposed and, in some cases, enacted in the past couple of years. For example, a new proposal from Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, would severely limit the hours when municipal clerks may offer in-person absentee voting for their constituents to no more than 24 hours a week, during business hours, for a two-week period prior to an election. This would reduce the opportunities for voters across the state who have daytime jobs or family commitments.

National: After Shelby, Voting-Law Changes Come One Town at a Time | Frontline

Just over a month after the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, seven states — five of which were covered under the law — are moving ahead with voting changes that could affect the 2014 Congressional election. The Justice Department has sued Texas to prevent new voting changes and threatened to step in elsewhere. But the battle for the ballot box isn’t going to be waged on the national level, or even the state level, voting-rights advocates say. It’s going to be fought in cities and small towns, at the level of county seats, school boards and city councils. That’s where 85 percent of the DOJ’s Section 5 objections have been under the Voting Rights Act since it was passed. And that’s where legal challenges, the only remaining remedy to fight voter discrimination, are likely to take place, said Dale Ho, head of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “That’s what we’re really worried about,” Ho said, adding: “I need more lawyers.”

Alabama: Redistricting trial scheduled to begin Thursday | The Montgomery Advertiser

A federal court Thursday is scheduled to begin hearing arguments over the state’s new legislative district lines, and whether they strictly followed the terms of the Voting Rights Act or were an attempt to dilute black lawmakers’ influence on legislation. The lawsuit, bought by the Alabama Legislature’s Black Legislative Caucus, alleges that that a reapportionment plan approved by the Republican-majority Legislature in 2012 — and ultimately approved by the U.S. Justice Department — pushes black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, into a limited number of districts, and limits their ability to form coalitions with white voters. The Caucus alleges that violates Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race.

Florida: Scott Takes Political Gamble With Renewed Voter Purge | Businessweek

Republican Governor Rick Scott is restarting his high-profile purge of suspected noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls in a move to appeal to core supporters that risks losing the backing of key swaths of the electorate. Scott, seizing on the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of a main element of the Voting Rights Act, has revived one of his administration’s most contentious missions: rooting out noncitizens from Florida’s list of 11.8 million voters. While the move to fight fraud may burnish Scott’s appeal to Republicans, strategists say, it risks reviving memories of polling-place snafus in 2012 and alienating the state’s growing Hispanic population. The purge, which began before the 2012 election, stalled when several U.S. citizens were targeted and a Latino-advocacy group sued, claiming discrimination.

Florida: Florida is already making it harder to vote, thanks to the Supreme Court | The Week

In June, the Supreme Court struck down a central piece of the Voting Rights Act, a move that Democrats warned would lead to a resurgence of restrictive, state-level voting laws. And indeed, since that ruling, a handful of Republican-led states have already renewed such efforts. As a quick refresher, the court nixed Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which established a formula to determine which jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination had to get “preclearance” from the Department of Justice before revising their voting laws. The DOJ still has that preclearance power, but without Section 4, that power is largely toothless. In response, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) this week asked state officials to resume scrubbing “noncitizens” from the state’s voting rolls. Scott launched that effort before the 2012 election, but his plan was held up by legal challenges from critics who claimed it was a blatantly partisan attempt to purge poor and minority voters, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic. “Governor Scott seemingly is bent on suppressing the vote in Florida, with his latest move coming as an unfortunate result of the recent Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act,” Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) said.

Florida: Vote suppression alleged in close Sopchoppy election | Associated Press

A small Florida Panhandle town best known for its annual Worm Grunting Festival is at the center of an investigation into charges the white city clerk suppressed the black vote in an election where the black mayor lost by a single vote and a black city commissioner was also ousted. Both losing candidates and three black voters have filed complaints, now being investigated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, that City Clerk Jackie Lawhon made it more difficult for blacks to cast ballots by questioning their residency. The candidates also allege Lawhon abandoned her duty to remain neutral and actively campaigned for the three whites on the ballot. “If the allegations that we have are 100 percent accurate, then this election was literally stolen from us and I really feel like there should be another election,” said Anginita Rosier, who lost her seat on the commission by 26 votes.

Texas: State moves to protect voter ID law | SCOTUSblog

Repeating its argument that its controversial new photo ID requirement for Texas voters is now in operation, the state on Thursday asked a federal court in Washington to put an end to a case testing that law’s validity.  The state filed a two-page motion to dismiss the case. That, however, could encounter resistance from the Obama administration, which believes the law impairs minorities’ voting rights and wants to block Texas from enforcing any such law. “Senate Bill 14 [the photo ID law] is now in full effect and being implemented in Texas,” according to Texas’s motion, filed in U.S. District Court in the case of Texas v. Holder (District Court docket 12-128).  That court ruled a year ago that the law would violate the voting rights of African Americans and Hispanics in Texas under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The Supreme Court in late June sent that case back to the district court, to reconsider in the wake of the decision in the Voting Rights Act case of Shelby County v. Holder. Texas’s motion to dismiss the case altogether appeared likely to set up a new courthouse confrontation with the Obama administration, because Justice Department lawyers are pressing federal courts to put all Texas laws governing voting under a new form of federal court supervision, barring enforcement until any such law gets cleared in Washington.  Texas is vigorously opposing that effort.

Texas: Texas Launches New Legal Attack On Voting Rights Act | TPM

Texas escalated a confrontation with the Obama administration this week over the Voting Rights Act, staking out an aggressive new challenge to the landmark 1965 law that could send it back to the Supreme Court for yet another review. “Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court invalidated the legislatively imposed preclearance requirement, calling it an ‘extraordinary’ ‘departure from the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ of the states,” Attorney General Greg Abbott wrote in a 54-page brief filed this week, in a case about whether the state’s latest redistricting map should be subject to court review before taking effect. “A judicially imposed preclearance requirement is no less extraordinary and no less constitutionally suspect.” Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at UC-Irvine, told TPM that the brief is “a signal to DOJ that Texas is not afraid to escalate if necessary, and they may have a receptive audience among the conservative Justices on the Supreme Court.”

Florida: Ruling Revives Florida Review of Voting Rolls | New York Times

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, newly empowered by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in June that struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, has ordered state officials to resume a fiercely contested effort to remove noncitizens from voting rolls. The program, which was put in place before the 2012 election, became mired in lawsuits and relentless criticism from opponents who viewed it as harassment and worse — a partisan attack by a Republican governor on Hispanic and Democratic voters. In a federal lawsuit filed last year in Tampa, an immigrants’ voting-rights group charged that the attempt to scrub the voter rolls disproportionately affected minority voters and that the state had failed to get Justice Department clearance as required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Voting Blogs: Texas Ups the Ante in Fight Over Voting Rights Act, Betting on An Emboldened Conservative Supreme Court | Election Law Blog

I recently wrote in NLJ about AG Holder’s Texas-sized gambit: to get Texas covered again under a preclearance regime using section 3 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s a move that is risky both legally and politically, for reasons I explain in the earlier piece and do not repeat here. Still, I was struck by the boldness of the State of Texas filing opposing bail in. Texas made the arguments I expected it to make: about the burden on those seeking preclearance to prove intentional discrimination being high, the inappropriateness of relying upon findings of intentional discrimination in a different court opinion—especially one that has been vacated, etc. (See Lyle Denniston’s summary of Texas’s filing.) But Texas made a bigger argument too, and it one that may make it back to the Supreme Court where, for reasons I will explain, the Court may accept it.

Texas: State fights new voting supervision | SCOTUSblog

Mounting a strong counter-attack to attempts by the Obama administration and others to give federal courts new powers of supervision over Texas voting laws, officials of the Lone Star State have told a three-judge district court in San Antonio that it cannot impose that regime at this stage, or at any point unless there is new proof of “rampant” racial bias in election procedures in the state. In a fifty-four-page filing Monday evening, state officials cited the Supreme Court’s June 25 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, and told the District Court that it “cannot impose preclearance on Texas while remaining faithful to Shelby County and the constitutional principles on which it relies.”  Preclearance obligations under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the state contended, can now only be ordered if racial bias in voting in a state rises to the level of the “ever-changing discriminatory machinations that gave rise to the preclearance regime in the first place….Nothing remotely like that has occurred in modern-day Texas.”

National: Historic Civil Rights Act of 1965 Celebrates a Bittersweet Birthday | BET

It was 48 years ago today when the nation saw a landmark piece of civil rights legislation go into effect with the enacting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enacted in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, it was an act that sought to address and curtail discrimination that had existed in the United States, particularly in many of the states in the South, including many provisions to make voting more accessible for African-American citizens. The Voting Rights Act became most notable for establishing federal oversight of elections administration. It carried a key provision that prohibited various states from enacting any changes in voting laws without first obtaining approval from the Department of Justice, a process known as pre-clearance. It is that pre-clearance provision, known as Section 5 of the Act, that has long been the most controversial component of the act. The opposition to the measure grew steadily over the years, namely from Republican members of Congress who complained that it carried an unfair burden on election laws in their areas.

Editorials: The Voting Rights Act Is in Peril on Its Forty-Eighth Anniversary | Ari Berman/The Nation

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson said on August 6, 1965, when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The VRA quickly became known as the most important piece of modern civil rights legislation and one of the most consequential laws ever passed by Congress. It led to the abolition of literacy tests and poll taxes; made possible the registration of millions of minority voters; forced states with a history of voting discrimination to clear electoral changes with the federal government to prevent future discrimination; and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials.

North Carolina: Voting Laws Could Hinge On Evidence Of Racism | Huffington Post

In recent weeks, civil-rights advocates and legal experts in North Carolina have contemplated a provocative question: Are the state’s Republican lawmakers racist? The answer could determine the future of North Carolina’s voting laws. If a court finds that the state’s lawmakers have engaged in a deliberate attempt to discriminate against minority voters, the federal government could require the state to clear all future election policies with the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court. That would renew the federal oversight that ended with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act. In June, a 5-4 United States Supreme Court majority struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that required jurisdictions with extensive histories of discriminating against minorities — including eight states in the South and parts of other states — to get “preclearance” from the DOJ before making changes to their voting policies.

South Dakota: Native American Vote-Suppression Scandal Escalates | Huffington Post

South Dakota has devised an ingenious new way to curb minority voting. For decades, suppressing the Native American vote here has involved activities that might not surprise those who follow enfranchisement issues: last-minute changes to Indian-reservation polling places, asking Native voters for ID that isn’t required, confronting them in precinct parking lots and tailing them from the polls and recording their license-plate numbers. The state and jurisdictions within it have fought and lost some 20 Native voting-rights lawsuits; a major suit is still before the courts. Two South Dakota counties were subject to U.S. Department of Justice oversight until June of this year. That’s when the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, saying, “Today, our Nation has changed.” Yes, it has. The VRA decision provided an opening for those who are uncomfortable when minorities, the poor and other marginalized citizens vote. Since the decision, new measures to limit enfranchisement have swept the country — mostly gerrymandering and restrictions on allowable voter IDs.

National: How far will the Justice Department go over voting rights? | Stateline

The glee in Republican-controlled states after the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling in June may give way to a different feeling for state officials: The crushing weight of a full legal offensive from the U.S. Justice Department. Attorney General Eric Holder is moving aggressively to renew federal control over Texas elections, even without the crucial legal lever the court eliminated. And Texas might be just the beginning. The court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required places with a history of discrimination to get any elections changes — everything from the location of polling places to voter ID laws — preapproved by a federal court or the Justice Department. All or parts of 16 states, mainly in the South, were bound by the so-called “preclearance” requirement.

Editorials: The voting rights disaster | Los Angeles Times

It has been less than six weeks since the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark law that for five decades has protected this country’s most basic democratic right. But it is already clear that the decision was a disaster. Freed of the obligation to seek federal approval before making changes in their election practices, some states have moved to introduce or restore policies that will make it harder for racial minorities to vote or will dilute their political influence. Meanwhile, as any student of contemporary politics could have predicted, a divided Congress shows no sign of moving quickly to adopt a new formula for federal “pre-clearance” of state election changes that would meet the Supreme Court’s requirements. Although the Voting Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination in voting nationwide, only some states, mostly in the South, had been required to obtain advance approval from the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal judge before they changed their election practices. The problem with that, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, was that the formula for deciding which states had to “pre-clear” changes was rooted in data from the 1960s and ’70s and didn’t reflect “current conditions,” notably dramatic increases in minority turnout in Southern states.

Editorials: The Republican Push to Make it Harder to Vote | Linda Killian/The Atlantic

Within 20 minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning a portion of the Voting Rights Act, the attorney general of Texas tweeted a message signaling that strict voter-ID laws would go into effect there immediately. “I’ll fight Obama’s effort to control our elections,” Greg Abbott, who just announced he’s running for governor of Texas, tweeted June 25, the day the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder was released. Unless the law can be successfully challenged in court, Texas residents will now have to show a state- or federal-issued form of photo identification to vote. The list of acceptable forms includes a concealed-handgun license but not a state university student ID. The omission suggests it is not voter fraud but voters unfriendly to the GOP that Abbott and other Texas Republicans are trying to thwart. Other states — like Mississippi and Arkansas – that have GOP-controlled legislatures and a history of racial discrimination, and whose election laws have been supervised by the Department of Justice since the VRA’s passage in 1965, have also wasted no time moving forward with new voting restrictions in the wake of the Shelby County decision.

Florida: Governor to launch new purge of Florida voter rolls | Bradenton Herald

Gov. Rick Scott will soon launch a new hunt for noncitizens on Florida’s voter rolls, a move that’s sure to provoke new cries of a voter “purge” as Scott ramps up his own re-election effort. Similar searches a year ago were rife with errors, found few ineligible voters and led to lawsuits by advocacy groups that said it disproportionately targeted Hispanics, Haitians and other minority groups. Those searches were handled clumsily and angered county election supervisors, who lost confidence in the state’s list of names. “It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate,” said Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards. “They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting.”

North Carolina: Voter ID Law Could Lead To Increased Voter Intimidation, Harassment, Election Officials Fear | Huffington Post

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, reports of harassment and intimidation at the polls were so rampant in North Carolina that the state’s top election official was obliged to send a memo to his employees reminding them that they could call police if necessary. Now, as North Carolina’s governor prepares to sign one of the most restrictive election bills in the nation, civil-rights advocates and election officials in the state expect to see a rise in what they call voter intimidation. The law, which North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory is expected to sign any day, would allow political parties to send 10 roving “observers” from precinct to precinct on voting days, and it would authorize citizens to challenge the legality of votes cast in the county where the challenger lives. (Under the current law, you can only challenge a vote cast by someone living in your precinct.) Supporters contend that the law will help observers catch people in the act of fraud, but critics point out that evidence of this type of fraud is scarce. They insist that the real goal is to intimidate Democratic-leaning black voters, some of whom may remember the threats and assaults that swept the South in the late 1960s, after the 1965 Voting Rights Act toppled the official barriers blacks had faced at the polls.

Editorials: The US civil war is playing out again – this time over voter rights | David A Love/theguardian.com

Nearly 150 years after the end of the US civil war, the South and the federal government are poised for a rematch over the voting rights of black Americans, and ultimately over the fundamental rights of all Americans. Once again, the former Confederate states are determined to defend their traditions and way of life, while the Union forces in the North – the federal government – are positioning themselves to defend justice and equality. But this time, in an ironic twist, two black men – President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder – are leading the charge. In the 1860s, the fight between the North and the South was about slavery and the right of the Confederate states to maintain a dreaded institution that kept people of African descent in bondage. Unprecedented carnage resulted. A century later – in light of the 1954 US supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, which ended racial segregation in public schools – the South struggled to maintain a Jim Crow system that kept black people legally and politically impotent, all in the name of states’ rights. Two hallmarks of the civil rights movement are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the legislative victories were achieved only through the blood of civil rights workers, both black and white, who were beaten, sprayed with fire hoses, shot, firebombed, bitten by police dogs and lynched.

National: Sensenbrenner Sees GOP Support to Rewrite Voting Law | CQ.com

Although many congressional Republicans so far have been noncommittal about rewriting an invalidated section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner said Wednesday that “a lot” of them want to do so. Sensenbrenner is the most prominent among a small number of GOP lawmakers who have urged a congressional rewrite of the statute after the Supreme Court partially struck it down in June. But that doesn’t mean other Republicans are not willing to join him in his effort, he told CQ Roll Call in an interview. “There are a lot of Republicans who are [on board], but they don’t want to be publicly named,” said Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a former Judiciary Committee chairman and architect of the 2006 compromise to reauthorize the voting law. “There’s a lot of pressure, and I’m happy to take that.” Sensenbrenner said he has “no idea” when the first legislative language of a rewrite might appear, but said “we’re going to start talking about drafts after the recess.” He and other negotiators — including two Democratic working groups in the House — will need to address two basic questions, he said.

Editorials: Right to vote needs federal protection | Steve and Cokie Roberts/Albany Herald

Cokie’s mother, Lindy Claiborne Boggs, was born on a plantation in the segregated south before women could vote. When she died last week at 97, Barack and Michelle Obama celebrated “her legacy as a champion of women’s and civil rights [that] will continue to inspire generations to come.” Protecting the right to vote was the central principle of Lindy’s political career. During the Louisiana governor’s race of 1939, she organized a group of women to prevent a corrupt machine from stealing the election. One of her cohorts stayed through the night “in a rough waterfront precinct” guarding a ballot box. Another was “pasted” by a rival and wound up with “a black eye and a swollen lip,” Lindy wrote in her memoir, “Washington Through a Purple Veil.” Lindy eventually served 18 years in Congress, succeeding her husband Hale, who was killed in a plane crash in 1972. Hale risked his career to support the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a cross was later burned on their lawn in New Orleans to protest his vote. “Hale and I strongly believed that the freedom to register and to vote were inherent rights of all citizens of the United States, and that only through the exercise of those rights could true democracy operate,” Lindy wrote.

Editorials: Quick assault on voting rights in GOP-controlled states reveals Supreme Court’s mistake | Lexington Herald-Leader

In her dissent to last month’s wrongheaded Supreme Court decision striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that ending the preclearance requirement for districts with a history of discrimination was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Just one month later, Republican lawmakers are flooding the country with voter suppression laws masquerading as voter ID laws and redistricting plans. Texas gleefully announced within two hours of the decision its plan to institute a redistricting map and strict voter ID laws that had been challenged by the Department of Justice as discriminatory. Attorney General Eric Holder is commendably trying to battle Texas’ discriminatory laws under a different section of the Voting Rights Act, but draconian voter ID laws are rapidly spreading through Republican-controlled states. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory says he will sign a nakedly partisan voter suppression bill, though he admits that he has not read it. Perhaps he should.

Louisiana: Baton Rouge redistricting case will test the future of the Voting Rights Act | Facing South

A federal trial is about to get underway in Louisiana that promises to be a case study into what happens in jurisdictions previously covered by the Voting Rights Act’s Section Five now that those protections have been vanquished by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Section Five required federal preclearance of election changes in places with a history of racial discrimination, most of them in the South. The case, which involves questions about fair racial representation among city court judges, has been allowed to go forth after U.S. District Judge Brian A. Jackson found that state lawmakers have been negligent in their obligations to black voters.

Editorials: Holder’s Texas-Sized Gambit after Voting Act Loss | Rick Hasen/National Law Journal

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on July 25 that it would seek renewed federal oversight of some jurisdictions previously subject to DOJ “preclearance” because of their history of racial discrimination in voting. The DOJ’s move, which will begin with Texas, is made under the Voting Rights Act’s little-used “bail in” provision—and it is risky, both politically and legally. But given the few alternatives to protect minority voters, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder probably figures the risks are worth taking. In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder stripped the U.S. Department of Justice of a key tool used to protect minority voters. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval or preclearance from the DOJ or a three-judge court in Washington D.C. before making any changes in their voting laws. The Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the formula in Section 4 used to define jurisdictions subject to preclearance, rendering Section 5 mostly inoperable.

Editorials: Texas Shows Congress Must Update the Voting Rights Act | Spencer Overton/Huffington Post

A recent court action against Texas is important, but it should not fool us into believing that existing laws are sufficient to protect voting rights. Indeed, the central lesson from Texas is that Congress must update the Voting Rights Act. Last week, the Justice Department joined several civil rights groups in asking a federal court to require that Texas preclear its future voting changes with federal officials. The Department relied on Section three of the Voting Rights Act, which remains in force even after last month’s Supreme Court decision. Section three allows a court to “bail in” to coverage areas with contemporary, intentional voting discrimination. Significant discrimination persists in Texas, and the court should order Texas to preclear future voting changes.

Editorials: Unbending commitment to voting rights | James Sensenbrenner/USAToday

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) is one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed. It began a healing process that ameliorated decades of discrimination and is vital to our commitment to never again permit racial prejudices in our electoral process. At a time of social upheaval and political inequality, the VRA helped distinguish America as the world’s premier example of democracy. Free, fair and accessible elections are sacrosanct, and the right of every legal voter to cast their ballot must be unassailable. In contrast to past attempts to end discrimination, the VRA required federal preclearance of changes to voting laws in areas with histories of discrimination. Section 5 of the VRA was the only federal remedy that could stop discriminatory practices before they impacted elections. Prior to the 2006 reauthorization, the Judiciary Committees held multiple hearings examining the VRA. Congress amassed a legislative record of over 15,000 pages, documenting invidious discrimination and demonstrating “the continued need for federal oversight.”