Is the Voting Rights Act a Smokescreen?

In 2007, several provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 will expire. Already, a movement is afoot to use the coming debate as a way to deny progress in race relations and ignore the real problem: low black voter turnout.

As a former elected official for a primarily African-American inner-ring suburb of Chicago, I can attest that driving more voters--black, white, or otherwise--to the polls can make a difference in any election. Low voter turnout is a serious concern in many elections across the U.S.

But no serious progress will be made to address that concern if the discussion is muddied by claims America is about to “turn back the clock” to the days of Jim Crow, when blacks could not vote in some areas of the country. Yet that is exactly the approach proposed by some civil rights luminaries at the NAACP convention earlier this year.

This is an emotional issue. Dr. Martin Luther King and a brigade of nonviolent social revolutionists sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears--and King his very life--to secure for African-Americans the right to vote. We dishonor their legacy when we engage in racially divisive rhetoric and ignore the truth about America’s plans to protect the sacred right to vote for all its citizens.

Expiring Provisions

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and amended several times. Most recently, the act was amended in 1982, and at that time certain provisions were set to be in place for 25 years. It is those provisions--not the act itself or its protections of the fundamental right of all citizens to vote--that will expire in 2007. The expiring provisions are:

• Section 4, which identifies all or parts of 16 states as having the most active history of discrimination against minority voters. Most of the designated jurisdictions are in the South, but areas of California, Michigan, New Hampshire, and New York are included.

• Section 5, which requires that the federal government approve any voting procedure changes proposed in the jurisdictions identified in Section 4. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Attorney General’s office is authorized to investigate any complaints about any policy that could be construed as having a negative effect on the voting patterns of protected minorities.

• Sections 6-9, which authorize election monitoring to guarantee fair elections. This is similar to having the United Nations go into a Third World country to secure fair elections.

• Section 203, which requires that certain voting materials be provided in languages--Spanish and Native American, for example--in addition to English.

A Crisis of Discrimination?

The Voting Rights Act was originally passed out of concern that Constitutional protections of the right to vote were not being enforced. The act was meant to address the disenfranchisement of Black voters.

In 1965, there were fewer than 300 Black elected officials in the United States. There were fewer than 70 in the former Confederate states, due to the Jim Crow statutes eradicated by the Voting Rights Act.

According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, in 2001 there were 9,101 Black elected officials in the U.S. The 10 states with the most Black elected officials were: Mississippi (892), Alabama (756), Louisiana (705), Illinois (624), Georgia (611), South Carolina (534), Arkansas (502), North Carolina (491), Texas (460), and Michigan (346). Eight of the top 10 are former Jim Crow states.

Today there are more than 150 Black state senators and more than 450 Black state representatives across the country. Most hail from the former Confederate states.

Clearly, disenfranchisement of the Black voter is no longer an issue. Most of the elected Black officials are elected from majority Black districts. So where is the crisis of discrimination that attempts to deny Blacks the right to vote?

What’s Really Behind it All

Voters are no longer being denied access to the right to vote because of race, level of education, lack of character references, or any of the other reasons addressed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And that fact presents a real problem for the panic-peddlers.

Unable to cry racism as an explanation for low voter turnout among Blacks, their last resort is to call for increasing the number of eligible voters by adding to the rolls those who remain ineligible to vote. The last repository of excluded voters just happens to be predominantly African-American: ex-felons.

Those who support the re-enfranchisement of felons figure some 80 percent of them would vote Democratic in a federal election, as do 80 percent of law-abiding Black voters. This could provide Democrats with another one million votes in a presidential election.

Inflammatory Rhetoric Ahead

Watch for this debate to play out with disturbingly inflammatory rhetoric. In the coming months, we will hear plenty about discriminatory law enforcement and racist sentencing, social problems that only government can solve, and other complaints--all of which will provide cover for the activists to launch their offensive to recoup potential Democratic votes.

There is nothing wrong with a candid and objective debate about re-establishing voting privileges for ex-felons. We may even want to consider allowing existing inmates to vote in federal and state elections. Re-enfranchising the incarcerated and former incarcerated may be the next watershed of votes for all parties to fight over: Certainly there are enough white-collar Enron, World-Com, and Martha Stewart-type felons to provide both major parties with growing clientele.

The Real Issue Is Turnout

All American citizens of good will can see the value in encouraging Black voters to break through their voting lethargy and apathy--without using allegations of institutionalized racism as an excuse for self-disenfranchisement, failing to vote when you have the rock-solid right to do so.

Last April, in my own bid for re-election as mayor of Maywood, Illinois, turnout was less than 25 percent in a community that is 90 percent African-American. It disturbs me deeply to know only one-quarter of the eligible voters in my community chose to exercise this essential right.

In the 2004 presidential election, Black voter turnout was under 30 percent. If Democrats cannot get 70 percent of registered African-American voters to the polls, isn’t it time for Republicans to reach out more pro-actively for greater inclusion?

A viable two-party system in African-American communities would bring an immediate end to the real disenfranchisement of Black voters, which starts with being taken for granted by the Democratic Party and ends with being completely ignored by the Republican Party. More than anything, this is what perpetuates the apathy and cynicism that lower Black voter turnout.

All of us--Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or otherwise--owe Dr. King and the original soldiers of the civil rights movement our commitment to actively appeal to the Black community to enter and remain a viable part of the electoral process by regularly, without coercion or financial incentives, exercising their constitutional right to vote.

Ralph Conner (conner@heartland.org) is public affairs director for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute and former mayor of Maywood, Illinois.