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| We talked about one anniversary taking a look at the events of World War of the World War II, but also another anniversary today, the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson. | ||
| We talked about it earlier on the program. | ||
| Here to talk about it more. | ||
| Atiba Ellis of Case Western Reserve University School of Law. | ||
| He's a professor there to talk about this anniversary. | ||
| Professor, thanks for giving us your time. | ||
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unidentified
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My pleasure to be here. | |
| Remind viewers where the United States was at the signing of the act and why it was needed. | ||
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Well, at the signing of the act in 1965, the United States was in the midst of strife and trouble. | |
| Certainly some of your viewers might remember that at that time, there was rampant protest and the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King and John Lewis and others had been advocating for over a decade at that time. | ||
| At the top of their list of concerns was the ability to participate in American elections, a full and unfettered right to vote. | ||
| Indeed, King's first speech in DC, and I love to mention this fact, wasn't I Have a Dream in 1963. | ||
| It was an address he gave in the late 50s called Give Us the Ballot. | ||
| That symbolizes how important voting rights was during the 50s and 60s civil rights movement. | ||
| And the problem they faced was rampant voter suppression in the South. | ||
| Now, it's ironic that the Constitution was amended during Reconstruction, but there was a problem with the constitutional amendments. | ||
| Even though the 15th Amendment itself made clear that there would be no discrimination on the basis of race in voting, the Southern legislatures that came after Reconstruction found a loophole. | ||
| If their laws were facially neutral, i.e. they didn't mention race, they could create literacy tests, poll taxes, and other devices designed to disenfranchise African Americans who were only a generation or two out of slavery. | ||
| And that had tremendous effect for over the first half of the 20th century. | ||
| It drove voting participation by African Americans in the South to, in some states like Mississippi, into the single digits in terms of their registration. | ||
| So the Voting Rights Act was needed to counter those devices and to create a national standard that gave teeth to what by 1965 was an almost meaningless 15th Amendment. | ||
| When you take a look at the signing in 1965, there have been various legal challenges to the act over the years. | ||
| What's been the end result of those legal challenges? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, certainly challenges came almost immediately after the signing of the act. | |
| But it's worth saying first that the act was successful. | ||
| Voting rights scholars often refer to the Voting Rights Act as the most successful piece of civil rights legislation in American history. | ||
| Those teens and single-digit numbers of African American participation jumped to 50 or 60 percent just by preventing barriers to registration. | ||
| And certainly Section 2 of the Act encoded in statute what the 15th Amendment was out to do, which was to give a cause of action for any election barrier that disenfranchised people on the basis of race. | ||
| And then, of course, there was the most controversial provision, Section 5 of the Act, which basically put on lockdown states that had a history of discrimination and low levels of participation from the minorities in that group. | ||
| And so over the decades, you saw numbers of challenges, first to the validity of the Act in 1966 in a case called South Carolina v. Kotzenbach. | ||
| And then later, there were amendments to the Act in 1982 in response to a Supreme Court ruling that basically said that the 15th Amendment could only be used in voting rights cases if there was evidence of purposeful discrimination. | ||
| That is, someone had to pass a voting rights measure and be on the record that they meant to discriminate against people of color. | ||
| But of course, the biggest challenge and the biggest change to the act was when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. | ||
| And that referred to that same Section 5. | ||
| And in particular, the court there held that the formula for figuring out which states ought to be covered by Section 5 and then be subject to what was called pre-clearance, i.e. a state passes a law and then they had to submit it to the Department of Justice or a court in Washington, D.C. for approval before they could put that law into effect. | ||
| That pre-clearance regime was basically nullified in the Shelby County decision because the court said the formula had not been effectively updated since the 70s and that it was Congress's responsibility to make such updates and it hadn't done so. | ||
| Indeed, the Voting Rights Act had been re-ratified again and again between the 70s and 2006 by Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| And indeed, the last major amendments to the act were signed by Ronald Reagan and then George W. Bush. | ||
| But the court said the act and its formula needed to keep up with modern times and Congress hadn't done that. | ||
| So they struck down the formula in 2013, which meant that the pre-clearance provision is no longer operative. | ||
| And that created a space for states to pass more stringent rules around voting. | ||
| Certainly, with the rise of voter identification laws and in the face of redistricting challenges that we see today, the loss of the pre-clearance regime meant a new era of deregulated voting rights, you know, defaulting to states and their changes. | ||
| And some states, as we all know, want to be more progressive when it comes to ensuring that voters can participate and have more progressive-minded notions of redistricting. | ||
| And other states want more regressive in the sense of they are worried about security as opposed to access and want more stringent voter regulation. | ||
| We have about a minute. | ||
| If you see it as of today, for all the challenges to the Voting Rights Acts that you described, are there still challenges today towards it? | ||
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unidentified
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There are indeed. | |
| There are cases working their way through the courts concerning whether private citizens can bring action under the Voting Rights Act and certainly Section 2, the operative provision. | ||
| It's based on this thing called the effects test, which means we don't look at intent, we look at what the provision does and how it affects voters. | ||
| Now, certainly the court has recently reaffirmed the test, but in doing so, it left the door open to more challenges. | ||
| And certainly more challenges are going to come to the act in the weeks and months and years to come. | ||
| Atiba Ellis, a professor at the School of Law at Cate Western Reserve University, talking about this Voting Rights Act 60th anniversary. | ||
| Professor, thanks for your time. | ||
| We do appreciate it. | ||
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Thank you. | |
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