THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT: SECURING THE BALLOT

Vol. 16 No. 7 (July, 2006) pp.550-554

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT: SECURING THE BALLOT, by Richard M. Valelly (ed). Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005. 400pp. Cloth. $105.00. ISBN: 1-56802-989-6.

Reviewed by Joseph N. Patten, Department of Political Science, Monmouth University. Email: jpatten [at] monmouth.edu

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. He referred to the Act as his “greatest accomplishment as President” during his final news conference, comparing it with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The original purpose of the Act was to provide an enforcement mechanism to the 15th Amendment by securing for African Americans the most basic of all rights – the right to vote. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, made it unlawful for any state to deny voting rights on the basis of race, marking the first time the U.S. Constitution conferred the right to vote upon any demographic group.

In THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT: SECURING THE BALLOT, we learn about this landmark piece of legislation from a number of critical perspectives, including the origins of the African American suffrage movement, the role of the Supreme Court, the formulation of the Act itself, and the transforming effect of the Act on American political life. Richard M. Valelly edits this groundbreaking volume written by political scientists, historians, and legal scholars.

The volume chronicles in vivid detail the extent to which African Americans flourished politically after ratification of the 15th Amendment. About 90 percent of all African Americans resided in the South during this period, and their political power was protected by federal troops dispatched there after the Civil War. Extending voting rights to freed slaves met with heavy resistance from white segregationists for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was their numerical minority status in five southern states.

African Americans were politically energized during Reconstruction and soon came to hold nearly one-half of the State House delegate seats in Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, and 16 African Americans were elected to the U.S. Congress. Xi Wang’s essay chronicles the origins of the segregationist backlash that was facilitated by a political arrangement crafted by Republicans and Democrats during the controversial 1876 presidential election. The leaders of the parties agreed to award 20 contested electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for a Republican pledge to remove federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The post-Reconstruction period (1877-1901) is regarded by scholars as the “nadir,” or the “Dark Ages,” of African American political life, and it is here that the southern strategy to disenfranchise voters takes root (p.57). [*551]

Robert C. Lieberman’s essay, “Disenfranchisement and Its Impact on the Political System,” highlights how southern states effectively nullified the 15th Amendment by implementing disenfranchising measures, such as literacy tests, sometimes with “grandfather clauses,” exempting from the test those eligible to vote before Reconstruction, or “understanding clauses,” granting broad discretionary powers to segregationist registrars to enroll white illiterates “who could understand constitutional provisions read to them” (p.38). Every southern state adopted poll taxes, where payments were required months in advance in the hope that the few African Americans able to pay might misplace the tax receipt by Election Day. African Americans were excluded from “white primaries” with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court, who upheld the notion that political parties were private associations until the SMITH decision in 1944. It was also common for southern county officials to place registration offices and polling stations in Ku Klux Klan strongholds, where African Americans were routinely beaten and sometimes killed for attempting to exercise their right to vote, all in compliance with U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo’s (D-MS) widely released challenge in his 1946 reelection bid to all “red blooded white men to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls” (p.53).

These measures proved successful. In Louisiana, African American voter registration fell from its peak of 95.6 percent in 1896 to 1.1 percent in 1904. South Carolina, which had an African American majority in their lower House during Reconstruction, did not elect a single African American from 1896 until the 1970s.

Congress and the Executive Branch largely deferred to southern home rule, and the Supreme Court routinely sided with southern state governments on substantive challenges to literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries and other disenfranchising measures into the mid-20th century. The political tide began to turn after World War II, however, when the more than one million African American soldiers sent to defeat Hitler’s racist ideology in Europe returned determined to challenge racism in their own hometowns (p.63). African Americans gained “social capital” by organizing church, fraternal, and educational organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and challenged the status quo in both the courts and the streets. Leaders such as Atlanta’s Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mississippi’s Medgar Evars organized a Civil Rights movement across the region that brought northern volunteers and national attention to white supremacy in the South (p.70). It was in this climate that Congress enacted the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation in places of public accommodations, but it failed to address voter disenfranchisement.

The Civil Rights Act (1964) also served to accelerate the southern political realignment away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party, a trend that began after President Truman integrated the American military. [*552] Lyndon Johnson faced fierce opposition to his Civil Rights agenda in the South, and the Democratic Party paid a high political price in the region after its adoption that lingers today. While Lyndon Johnson received 61 percent of the national vote against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race, he received only 12.9 percent of the vote in Mississippi, and was not even on the ballot in Alabama (p.115).

Because of the political fallout from the Civil Rights Act, many national Democrats were not eager to address voter disenfranchisement in the South. Events in Selma, Alabama, however, where Dr. King was imprisoned and where peaceful voting rights demonstrators were beaten by law enforcement officials on national television, forced President Johnson and other national leaders to intervene. Southern disenfranchisement efforts were still in full force in 1965. It is in this context that President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

One of the most prominent features of the Voting Rights Act is found in Section 2, which prohibits all states from imposing literacy tests and poll taxes, and other voting prerequisites resulting in the disenfranchisement of voters on the basis of race. The Voting Rights Act is distinct from the Civil Rights Act in that it contains permanent and non-permanent features. The two most controversial non-permanent (i.e. requiring reauthorization) provisions are found in sections 4 and 5. Section 4 outlines the “triggering formula,” describing the conditions “that would bring a jurisdiction under the protection of the act” (p.96). This provision was controversial because it meant that other parts of the Act would only target states with a history of discriminatory practices, defined as those jurisdictions that had a voter turn-out rate of less than 50 percent and a “voting test” in place during the 1964 presidential election. The “covered jurisdictions” included the states of Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and certain counties in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, and North Carolina.

Section 5 of the Act prohibits all “covered jurisdictions” from implementing any electoral changes without first receiving permission from either the U.S. Attorney General’s Office or a D.C. District Court. This “preclearance” provision shifts the legal burden of proof away from protected groups and to the governmental entity proposing electoral reform. Sections 6 through 8 empower the Attorney General to dispatch election examiners to oversee elections in covered jurisdictions (p.95).

The Voting Rights Act has been either substantively amended and/or reauthorized in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 1992, and the non-permanent provisions are scheduled to expire once again on August 6, 2007. Congress is expected to reauthorize the Act, although a scheduled vote for June 21, 2006, was canceled after some House Republicans voiced opposition to the “preclearance” and “bilingual ballot” provisions. Colin D. Moore’s essay, “Extensions of the Voting Rights Act,” highlights how the Act has expanded over the years. In [*553] 1975, Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) sponsored a bill that extended the provisions to language minorities, requiring local jurisdictions to “provide bilingual voting registration materials and ballots” if a particular language minority constituted more than five percent of the voting population and if that jurisdiction’s voter turnout was less than 50 percent in the 1972 presidential election, thereby extending coverage to Arizona, Texas, California, Florida, New York, and South Dakota (p.105).

The Act was temporarily weakened by the Supreme Court’s CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN (1980) decision, where the court ruled that laws having the “effect” of disenfranchising protected groups are permissible as long as they are not “motivated by discriminatory purposes” (p.105). This was reversed two years later, however, when Rep. Peter Rodino (D-NJ) successfully inserted language into the Act that made it unlawful for covered jurisdictions to propose electoral changes that “resulted” in the disenfranchisement of protected groups regardless of the laws “intent,” thereby establishing the “result” standard as the Act’s guiding principle.

David A. Bositis’ chapter, “Impact of the ‘Core’ Voting Rights Act on Voting and Officeholding,” reveals how the Voting Rights Act has “fundamentally transformed” American politics. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that only 5.2 percent of African Americans were registered to vote in Mississippi in the early 1960s (p.113). The situation had changed dramatically by 1968 when a majority of African Americans were registered to vote in every southern state. Galvanized in part by Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid in 1984, these trends continued into the mid-1980s, when African American registration and turn-out rates came to equal the rates of southern whites (p.114). Pei-te Lien’s essay on the impact of the Voting Rights Act on language minorities points out, however, that the Act has not been so successful in reversing registration and voting trends with Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.

One of the most thought provoking articles is Mark Rush’s essay, “The Voting Rights Act and its Discontents,” where he explores the underlying tension existing in the modern voting rights movement. Should voting rights be viewed as a positive or a negative right? Should government take affirmative steps to enhance the political position of historically disenfranchised groups (i.e., positive right), or should government merely prohibit local jurisdictions from obstructing voter access (i.e., negative right). By the 1990s, voting rights issues had become more subtle, and the Supreme Court was asked to address the philosophical question inherent in racial gerrymandering, in such cases as SHAW v. RENO (1993), MILLER v. JOHNSON (1995), and EASLEY v. CROMARTIE (2001). If it is illegal to draw a legislative district line “at the expense of one political group, can we justify manipulating it for their benefit?” (p.147). Rush also highlights voting rights scholar Carol M. Swain’s supposition that the “reelection interests of minority incumbents might be antithetical” to both the representation rights of minority voters and the Democratic Party, arguing that each [*554] would have greater political power if minorities were dispersed more broadly throughout legislative districts, rather than concentrating their power in a few majority-minority created districts.

Valelly’s edited volume does a masterful job of taking the reader through the “nadir” of African American political life and into the struggle for voting rights and beyond. While some of the narratives on seminal Supreme Court cases and political realignment trends slightly overlap, readers benefit from processing these themes through the distinct perspectives found in the intellectual kaleidoscope of the ten essays. The major contribution of the volume is that it provides an intellectual foundation from which all discussions on modern voting rights can launch.

The volume also reminds us that remnants of efforts to disenfranchise protected groups might still be with us today. A Georgia voter identification law requiring voters to possess one of six pre-approved photo identifications was approved by the Chief of the Department of Justice’s Voting Rights section in 2006 after staff members recommended that it be blocked. There are currently 675,000 registered voters in Georgia, many of whom are African American, who do not possess a photo identification driver’s license. The new measure prohibits the past practice of accepting birth certificates, social security cards, or utility bills as one of 17 types of identification previously accepted at polling stations in Georgia. Voting rights advocates believe this law will dampen African American turn-out rates in the 2006 mid-term election.

Political science research has long established that political participation is highly unequal, resulting in inequities of influence. This well-written volume makes a powerful contribution to structural explanations as to how voting trends correlate with registration guidelines and rules governing access across states. It is a must read for American politics scholars and for anyone interested in learning more about one of the most successful pieces of legislation ever to be signed into American law.

CASE REFERENCES:

CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN, 446 US 55 (1980).

EASLEY v. CROMARTIE, 532 US 234 (2001).

MILLER v. JOHNSON, 515 US 900 (1995).

SHAW v. RENO, 509 US 630 (1993).

SMITH v. ALLWRIGHT, 321 US 649 (1944).

*************************************************