Diverse Chorus of Supporters Backs Voting Rights Act

by James Parks, Jul 17, 2006

With the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled to hold hearings this week on the Voting Rights Act (VRA), supporters are pushing hard for a vote before senators go back to their home districts for the August recess.

NAACP President Bruce Gordon said in a statement that passing the Voting Rights Act is a “no-brainer.”

Unlike many other issues, reauthorizing the VRA is a “no-brainer” for most congressional members. The NAACP urges all members and friends to reach out to their representatives and senators to stress the urgency of passing a clean version of the Voting Rights Act.

In this election year, no elected official should want to be recorded as opposing one of this nation’s most prized rights for all citizens—the right to vote. We urge Congress to move now to revalidate this monumental legislation that empowers all Americans.

Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in a recent editorial that Congress has a moral obligation to renew the Voting Rights Act:

A Congress with far fewer African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because the right to vote had been denied for far too long.

Congress made a moral decision that it was the right thing to do for our democracy. It is time for Congress to make the same moral decision on the Voting Rights Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. The act merits passage because the record demonstrates that the work of assuring that every citizen has the right to vote in our democracy is still incomplete.

The House reauthorized several key sections of the law by a strong 390–33 margin July 13. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold hearings as early as Wednesday, before sending the bill to the Senate floor.

S. 2703, the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, would renew for 25 years key sections of the VRA, including those that require language assistance and give the federal government authority to review changes in voting rules in states with a history of discrimination.

During the House debate, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) offered an amendment to eliminate requirements for language assistance for voters who have limited proficiency in English. The amendment failed 185–238 but garnered more votes than any other amendment. While most of the attention in the debate was focused on Latino or Caribbean immigrants, a recent study by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) shows a great need for language assistance among Asian American voters as well. Among the study’s findings:

• Forty percent of the 14 million Asian American citizens have limited proficiency in English.
• Asian American voter turnout jumped by 71 percent between 1996 and 2004, far outpacing increases for Latinos (57 percent), blacks (26 percent) and whites (15 percent).
• In 2004, one-third of the Chinese American and Korean American voters said they used an interpreter to help them vote.
• Asian American voters still are being disenfranchised in many states by a series of familiar anti-voter techniques such as incomplete voter rolls, improper identification, poor training of election officials and lack of interpreters.

Although Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) told Reuters he expects the bill to pass before Congress goes home for the year in late September, passage is not a sure thing.

Some senators, such as Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), are repeating the same arguments pushed by a gang of extremist, southern, conservative House members who hijacked the legislation for three weeks. The politicians offered four amendments that would have gutted the critical portions of the law, but all the amendments were defeated easily.

However, unlike in the House, one determined senator can hold the legislation hostage through a filibuster. That’s why the AFL-CIO and its allies are asking members to continue to contact their senators and tell them to vote to reauthorize the VRA.

In another example of the need for the VRA, the top election official in El Paso County, Colo., is proposing the state require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink, a Republican, says he wants to require future voter applicants to provide a birth certificate, passport, naturalization papers or a certified copy of a birth certificate to register.

Many immigrants do not have the IDs needed to prove citizenship and cannot afford to purchase them from the state, immigration and voting reform, advocates say.
Colorado legislators recently passed a law that requires IDs before you can receive state benefits such as health care.

A state judge in Georgia recently struck down that state’s voter ID law. A federal suit is pending. In Arizona, voters last year approved a law requiring IDs for voters. 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.

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