An appeals court ruling that weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act is spurring lawmakers in several states to enact state-level protections to plug gaps that the ruling opened in the landmark federal law aimed at prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act is seen as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. But federal courts have “chipped away” at it over the decades, said Lata Nott, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., who testified for the Minnesota bill.
The biggest blow to the federal law in the view of voting rights advocates was a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in an Alabama case that stripped the government of a potent tool to stop voting bias by eliminating the requirement that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting get “preclearance” from the federal government for major changes in the way they hold elections.
Conservatives have argued the requirement did not account for racial progress and other changes in society and that existing voting rights protections are adequate.
“It looks like this an effort by the Left in the state to do at the state level what they can’t do at the federal level under the VRA,” said Zack Smith, a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
The 8th Circuit decision sounded new alarms because most lawsuits to enforce the act have come from private individuals and groups, not the Justice Department, Nott said. Administrations change, so allowing people to protect their own voting rights is a “valuable enforcement mechanism,” she said.
Alabama has recently placed new restrictions on assistance with absentee ballot requests, making it illegal to return another person's ballot application and making it a felony to pay someone to distribute or collect applications.
Republicans in the Alabama Legislature had named the bill as a key priority for the year and aimed to get it in place before the November election. Republicans said it is needed to combat voter fraud through “ballot harvesting,” a term for the collection of multiple absentee ballots. Opponents argued that there is no proof that ballot harvesting exists and called it an attempt to suppress voting by absentee ballot.
“SB1 and bills like it are just another form of voter suppression that do nothing to protect the ‘integrity’ of our elections but do a great deal to make it harder for voters with disabilities to cast their ballot," the League of Women Voters of Alabama said in statement about the legislation. The group said that “voter assistance is not a crime and should not be treated as such.”
The new law makes it a misdemeanor to distribute an absentee ballot application that is prefilled with information such as the voter's name. It also says that no one other than the voter applying for an absentee ballot can return the application to their county’s absentee election manager. Absentee ballot applications can be returned in person or by mail or commercial carrier.
It also makes it a felony to give, or receive, a payment or a gift “for distributing, ordering, requesting, collecting, completing, prefilling, obtaining, or delivering a voter’s absentee ballot application.”
With the appeals court ruling that weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act, Democratic-led states have been taking matters into their own hands because national legislation to expand voting rights remains stalled in a divided Congress. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in many states have tried to erode safeguards in the name of protecting election integrity amid former President Donald Trump's false claims that vote fraud cost him the 2020 election.
Legislators in Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey and Florida are pursuing state voting rights acts, building on ones enacted by New York in 2022 and Connecticut in 2023, as well as ones enacted earlier in Virginia, Oregon, Washington and California.
In Minnesota, Democratic Rep. Emma Greenman, of Minneapolis, said she felt an urgent need to act after the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year in an Arkansas case that voters and groups could no longer sue under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act — only the U.S. attorney general.
Section 2 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, including maps that disadvantage voters of color. Lawsuits have long been brought under the section to try to ensure Black voters have adequate political representation in places with a long history of racism, including many Southern states.
Read more here.
