16 March 2009

Reach of U.S. Civil Rights Law Debated, Reviewed Decades Later

Supreme Court ruling limits applicability of voting rights act

The reach of the Voting Rights Act, signed by President Johnson in 1965, continues to be debated today.

By Michelle Austein Brooks
Staff Writer

Washington — The reach of a landmark civil rights law continues to be interpreted years after its passage, as the Supreme Court recently demonstrated in its ruling regarding the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

On March 9, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the act, ruling in a 5-4 decision that governments are not required to draw electoral district boundaries in a way that helps minority voters elect the candidate of their choice, unless the minority group makes up at least 50 percent of the area’s voting-age population.

The Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, sought to remove formal and informal barriers that kept African Americans from freely casting ballots. These included poll taxes — a fee for voting — and literacy requirements. The act also established federal oversight of electoral districts with a history of disenfranchising minority voters. (See “The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background.”)

The act, under Section 2, prohibits “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure … which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Since its passage, the Voting Rights Act has been renewed and expanded periodically by Congress. The exact meaning and reach of the act’s provisions have been debated and reviewed by courts numerous times during the past 40 years.

Enforcement of the act has improved the ability of minorities to elect the representatives of their choosing. But just how much assistance the act guarantees has been a subject of debate and the issue at question in the case Bartlett v. Strickland.

In Bartlett, minority voters in one of North Carolina’s state legislative districts argued they should be protected from redistricting because they have been able to elect African-American candidates by building effective coalitions even though African-American voters do not constitute a majority within the district. African-American voters make up about 39 percent of the population in this district, commonly referred to as a “crossover” district.

In defending its decision to dismantle the district, the state contended that minority groups cannot assert they are protected under the act unless they represent 50 percent or more of the population.

The court agreed with the state, determining that North Carolina does not have an obligation to design a district that enables minorities to elect, with the support of a small number of nonminority voters, their chosen candidate.

“Section 2 does not impose on those who draw election districts a duty to give minority voters the most potential, or the best potential, to elect a candidate by attracting crossover voters,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his opinion.

Furthermore, by determining whether a potential district is a crossover district, government officials and courts would be in the “untenable position of predicting many political variables and tying them to race-based assumptions,” Kennedy wrote. “The judiciary would be directed to make predictions or adopt premises that even experienced polling analysts and political experts could not assess with certainty.”

The court’s ruling could have an impact following the 2010 census, when some electoral boundaries will be redrawn as new population data become available.

State legislatures define congressional districts in a process that often can become politically contentious. The political party in control of a state’s legislature may consider how the court’s ruling gives it greater flexibility to draw district boundaries in a way that it believes will benefit its party.

Opinions of the court (PDF, 52 pages) in the case of Bartlett v. Strickland are available on the Supreme Court Web site.