DEL.ICIO.USLaw still essential to voters
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Critics of the Voting Rights Act contend it’s an antiquated artifact, an outmoded law that did its job well and ought to be retired.
The racism the act was intended to address — a legal framework that denied black citizens the franchise — has long since been vanquished, those critics say, so the law is itself unfair, still punishing a handful of states for crimes they no longer commit. That’s the central theme in a legal challenge, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, to the act’s Section 5, which requires several states to receive Justice Department approval for any changes to their voting procedures.
Just look at the Deep South, say critics such as Gov. Sonny Perdue. People of color have been elected to political offices high and low, many of them with substantial support from whites. Or look at the Oval Office, they say. How can anyone argue that black Americans are denied political power when Americans just elected their first black president?
Those critics have a point. In the 44 years since Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the nation, including its southern region, has changed dramatically. In Georgia, as just one example, a black man, Thurbert Baker, has been elected three times as attorney general, while state Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears became the first black woman to win a contested statewide election in 1992. Racism is not dead, but it is wounded and frail, a shadow of its former self.
But the growing political power of black Southerners is not the only evidence of change in the Deep South. So are the racially charged strategies of the Republican Party, which has abandoned its roots as the party of the unfettered franchise. It has swapped places with the Democratic Party; now the GOP is the party of voter suppression. The Supreme Court shouldn’t decide the fate of Section 5 without considering the record of GOP-dominated state legislatures, especially in the South, which have passed harsh voter ID laws as barriers to the franchise.
In the 1950s, the Deep South was dominated by the Democratic Party, whose state organizations insisted on “whites-only” primaries. If black Southerners wanted to vote, they were more likely to be welcomed by the Republican Party. But as the Democratic Party came to be identified with civil rights, many white Southerners switched loyalties.
With its “Southern strategy” of appealing to alienated whites, the modern GOP makes little effort to appeal to black voters (or Latinos). Instead, the party has decided to make it more difficult for poor blacks — those without a driver’s license — to vote by passing laws that require a state-sponsored photo ID at the polls.
While Republican supporters of strict voter ID laws claim they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, those claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. For one thing, the sort of fraud the laws aim to prevent — illicit balloting by fake voters who show up at the polls — is virtually nonexistent. Voter fraud is much more common in absentee balloting, which ID laws do next-to-nothing to stop.
Voter ID laws, of course, act as a barrier to some elderly or poor whites, as well, those who don’t have a car and, therefore, have no need for a license. But it disenfranchises black voters disproportionately. That’s because centuries of racist oppression lives on in a black population that is more likely to be impoverished, without the resources to obtain a state-sponsored photo ID.
Until that legacy is eroded, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act remains essential, one more tool to ensure an unfettered franchise for all.
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