44 Years After Landmark Act, Voting Rights Still Needed
Today marks the 44th anniversary of the landmark Voting Rights Act, passed to reverse the Jim Crow laws, which effectively denied African Americans the right to vote for decades.
The Act has accomplished great things. It eliminated poll taxes, literacy tests and other ballot box barriers. Within a few years of its passage, voter registration rates among African Americans doubled, tripled and in some states quadrupled.
Fast forward to the 2008 presidential election and its surge of African-American voter participation. Although the protections of the Act remain vital, according to one recent report, African-American women voters turned out at higher rates in November than any other racial, ethnic or gender group.
But one Jim Crow relic continues to elude the strong arms of the Voting Rights Act. Nationwide, 5.3 million American citizens are denied the right to vote because of a criminal conviction in their past. Four million are people who are out of prison, living in the community. Criminal disenfranchisement laws differ state-to-state. All told, 35 states continue to disenfranchise people released from prison.
Let's be clear, these laws were put in place right alongside poll taxes and literacy tests. In the late 1800s, as part of larger backlash against the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, criminal disenfranchisement laws spread throughout the country. At the same time, states expanded their criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed freed slaves were most likely to commit, including vagrancy, petty larceny and bigamy. This targeted criminalization and criminal disenfranchisement combined to produce the legal loss of voting rights, which effectively suppressed the power of African Americans for decades.
The laws' intended effects continue to this day. Nationwide, 13 percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote because of a criminal conviction. In eight states, more than 15 percent of African Americans cannot vote, and three of those states disenfranchise more than 20 percent of the African-American voting-age population. Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of African-American men will lose the right to vote at some point in their lifetime.
Despite the clear evidence of discriminatory intent and impact, courts continue to uphold these laws, finding that Congress did not intend to prohibit criminal disenfranchisement when it passed the Voting Rights Act. Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals was the latest to issue such a ruling.
Luckily, we have three branches of government, and Congress now has the opportunity to declare loud and clear that it is time to consign these laws to the Jim Crow past. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to all Americans who are out of prison, living in the community. The Democracy Restoration Act is the Voting Rights Act of the 21st Century. Congress should move quickly to end voting discrimination once and for all.
More important than the voting Rights Act is district size. The legislative districts across the nation are enormous. They effectively invalidate everyone’s choice for a representative. This is not looked at by anyone in academia. For instance California’s Assembly districts have 475,000 people each. Consider the problems in New York. The state is openly corrupt. The key reason is their Assembly districts have over 120,000 people in them. If you increased the number of representatives, the district size would shrink. Corruption would go down as well.
the Anti Federalists were deeply concerned about the number of representatives:
“Clear it is, by increasing the representation we lessen the prospects of each member of congress being provided for in public offices; we proportionably lessen official influence, and strengthen his prospects of becoming a private citizen, subject to the common burdens, without the compensation of the emoluments of office. By increasing the representation we make it more difficult to corrupt and influence the members; we diffuse them more extensively among the body of the people, perfect the balance, multiply information, strengthen the confidence of the people, and consequently support the laws on equal and free principles.” Federal Farmer IX Maryland Gazette, January 4, 1788.
They were protesting the fact that the US House was only going to have one representative for every 30,000 which they thought was far too few. Well each US House member now represents 700,000 which is over 20 times what the Anti-Federalists were complaining about!
Michael