Elisabeth MacNamara, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, said “By cutting the heart out of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has weakened our ability to keep our elections free, fair, and accessible to every voter while at the same time emboldening those who seek to create barriers to voting.”
MacNamara also said, “The Court weakened the Voting Rights Act as mechanism to fight discrimination by striking down Section 4, which determines the states and jurisdictions that must secure federal approval before changing election laws. The fact that the Department of Justice blocked over 700 voting changes they found to be discriminatory from 1982-through the VRA’s 2006 reauthorization speaks for itself.”
The people of Iowa have challenges to maintain their own voting system. Will the people of Iowa allow laws and administrative rules to be put in place that will intimidate some voters and make voting unnecessarily cumbersome for the rest of the indoor positioning system? Will elections in Iowa be subject to laws that block some qualified voters from the polls and make access to the vote more difficult for everyone?
Administrative rules recently set by the secretary of state have greatly discouraged some qualified voters. Registration rolls are now purged using federal data bases that were never intended for that purpose, and are not appropriate for this use. Our driver license rolls are also inappropriate for use in voter registration questions and their use is costly for Iowans. Secretary of State investigations have used more than $200,000 and resulted in less than 10 alleged voter registration violations and no convictions.
There are Iowa legislators that would have us believe that we need to spend millions of dollars to institute a voter photo ID law that would greatly decrease the efficiency of our elections and create an insurmountable barrier for qualified voters who cannot satisfy the bureaucratic red tape these laws create or afford the added expense they may put on the registration process. Think about everyone you know who is disabled and does not drive, lives in a nursing home, students, and people in cities who use public transportation. All would be affected by voter photo ID law.
Iowans deserve elections that are free, fair and accessible. The recent Supreme Court ruling has put the responsibility for elections squarely in the hands of the states. It is important that each Iowan be vigilant to insure elections are accessible to every qualified voter.
The Supreme Court left intact the part of the Voting Rights Act that directly prohibits discriminatory voting rules, and they can still be challenged in court after they're passed. But the preclearance process has proven especially effective in protecting voting rights in places with a history of discrimination. In their ruling, the five justices who rejected Section 4 said Congress would be within its constitutional rights to craft new legislation to revise the preclearance criteria.
Getting Congress to act swiftly would seem unlikely, however. While Democrats responded that new standards must be written, very few Republicans spoke out, especially in the House where the GOP is in control. That was in contrast to many leaders in Republican-led states who hailed the high court's decision and eagerly pushed their new voting rules.
Still, some Democrats suggest that national Republicans who have been interested in "rebranding" the GOP as less hostile to African Americans and other minorities may conclude that it's not in their interest to be seen as taking advantage of the truncated Voting Rights Act.
"What is needed most on this issue is bipartisanship so there can be enough people on the Republican side to say, 'This law has worked pretty good for almost 50 years. We need to follow the direction of the court and come up with a new criteria,'" said Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), pointing to Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), an author of the 2006 extension of the Voting Rights Act and one of the few Republicans who spoke out aggressively on the issue.
"If the Supreme Court really had a real desire for us to come up with a new formula and if they really believed that we had some desire to bring them something that they thought was appropriate, then they would have given us some guidance or some direction as to what they were looking for," Fudge told HuffPost. "So as far as I'm concerned, the Supreme Court, for all intents and purposes, believes that we cannot do it. I happen to disagree with that."
"I don't believe that the speaker would not move," she added, arguing that for Boehner to sit on his hands, he would have to "basically ignore a decision of the Supreme Court" that said new legislation is the proper remedy.
"It's not going to be easy for him, but the good thing is, I think, there are enough of us in the House who do believe in democracy that even if we can't agree on everything, we can agree on enough to get something back into Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act," Fudge said. "I just can't believe it won't happen."
There is precedent for his concern. Recently, Boehner failed to rally Republican House members behind the much less controversial farm bill, which failed in his chamber largely thanks to opposition from conservatives. Many of them hail from states that fell under the preclearance requirements and from states that have aggressively gerrymandered voting districts to protect Republican majorities.
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