With Voting Rights Under Attack, Activists Mobilizing to Renew Voting Rights Act

by James Parks, Jul 7, 2006

With the reauthorization of the nation’s most successful civil rights law being held up by a small group of extremist Southern Republicans from Georgia, Texas and other states, grassroots members of the AFL-CIO and national civil rights groups have been mobilizing around the country to get it back on track.
 
During a national conference call last week, nearly 200 state and local union leaders, members of Congress and civil rights leaders discussed strategies to build support to renew the Voting Rights Act.
 
Congress returns from the July 4 recess next week, leaves again in August and returns in September, when members will turn their attention to appropriations bills. The crush of appropriations votes and the need for members to return home to campaign could push the VRA to the back burner for this session.  Supporters say the bill needs to be renewed this session because the crowded legislative calendar next year may prevent the bill from clearing all legislative hurdles before it expires.

You can act now.  Read a suggested message that you can send to your members of Congress to support the Voting Rights Act.
 
The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006 (H.R. 9 and S. 2703), would renew key sections of the VRA that require language assistance and give the federal government authority to review changes in voting rules in states with a history of discrimination.

The bill has strong bipartisan support, and the House Judiciary Committee in May sent it to the floor without amendments on a 33–1 vote.

During the conference call, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, chairman of the AFL-CIO’s Political Education Committee, emphasized the importance of grassroots efforts and reminded everyone that the VRA was enacted in 1965 because the labor community and the civil rights community, “the two strongest forces in the nation’s history,” joined forces to get it done. 
 
The push to renew the VRA comes as Republicans across the country are launching other attacks on minority voting rights.  Late last month, the House Administration Committee considered legislation (H.R. 4844) mirroring an Arizona law that would require voters in a federal election to prove they are U.S. citizens and present a photo ID.
 
The proposal, sponsored by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), would apply registration requirements similar to those in Arizona’s Proposition 200, a voter-approved law that also denied some government benefits to undocumented immigrants.

Proposition 200, which was first used in local elections in March, has made it increasingly difficult for some citizens, particularly elderly American Indians, to register or vote because they don’t have required identification, including birth certificates or federal or state forms of identification, according to a study by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
 
In fact, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), among the most vitriolic opponents of immigration, recently published an anti-immigration screed, Whatever It Takes—which denounces what Hayworth calls an “insidious multiculturalism”—the idea that all cultures are equally valid and worthy. (Read more at Orcinus blog.) Hayworth also signed on to a May 29 letter by New York Republican Rep. Peter King attacking the language assistance provisions of the VRA.
 
In May, Missouri’s Republican-dominated legislature passed one of the nation’s most restrictive voting bills, requiring voters to show government-issued photo ID cards before they can cast a ballot.  Election officials estimate the new law could disenfranchise as many as 190,000 voters, mainly people of color, seniors and people with disabilities.
 
Last month, a New York Times editorial attacked Republican efforts to limit voting in Ohio and Florida:

This year, [Ohio Secretary of State and Republican nominee for governor Kenneth] Blackwell’s office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors.
 
Another of the nation’s most famous swing states, Florida, has been the scene of similar consternation and confusion since it recently enacted a law that is so harsh that the Florida League of Women Voters announced that it was stopping all voter registration efforts for the first time in 67 years.
 
Mr. Blackwell and other politicians who insist on making it harder to vote never say, of course, that they are worried that get-out-the-vote drives will bring too many poor and minority voters into the system.  They say that they want to reduce fraud.  However, there is virtually no evidence that registration drives are leading to fraud at the polls.

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