April 29, 2009 4:52 PM
http://blogs.abcnews.com/legalities/200 ... rners.html
...The Voting Rights Act, strong-armed through Congress by LBJ, was necessary to protect the right to vote, and it applied in states that used poll taxes, tests and other devices to exclude blacks--in other words, throughout much of the entire Deep South.
But today, some 45 years later, much has changed. Blacks have held elected office at the highest levels in the South. Voter disenfranchisement in some places is lower than the nationwide average. Yet those same Southern states still are subjected to the restrictions of the federal law because of their past transgressions--even though in some areas they fare better on voter equality than states like Ohio and Massachusetts, which are not covered by the act.
The Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, as well as Alaska and Arizona) remain fully under the thumb of the federal government, and must get permission before making any change--no matter how minor--in voting procedures. Complying with the federal law cost those states and a handful of counties and municipalities across the country $1 billion in the past decade, one court filing estimates.
Today's arguments in the Supreme Court were incredibly compelling, and they got straight at this question, as raised by Chief Justice Roberts, to a lawyer defending the Act:
"Is it your position today that Southerners,” Roberts asked, “are more likely to discriminate than Northerners?"
To defend the Voting Rights Act's continuing targeted coverage of the South, the lawyer had to concede the answer essentially is yes—because discrimination there, he said, is more repetitious.
But some of the numbers show otherwise. As Justice Alito pointed out, the differential in Latino and white voter registration in Texas is 18.6 percent. That sounds like a high number--until you realize the difference Latino and white voter registration in California is 37 percent; Colorado is 28 percent; New Mexico is 24 percent. The nationwide differential in Latino and white voter registration is a whopping 30 percent, Alito pointed out.
As Justice Kennedy said: "The government of the United States is saying our states must be treated differently. No one is questioning the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act. The question is whether it should be continued with this differentiation between the states." ...
