“Voting Rights in America: From Historical Struggles to Recent Legal Battles”
A large part of United States history reflects a long and endured struggle, by Black Americans and other minorities, to obtain the right to vote, the Women’s Suffrage movement must be included. So one point in time, only men, who owned land or property were eligible to vote.
Upon the end of the Civil War, the the country experienced Reconstruction, wherein formerly enslaved people were granted citizenship via the 14th amendment, which impacted the political landscape, primarily in the Southern states, but that didn’t always deliver access to voting, where they were being systematically turned away from state polling places, which led to the passage of the 15th Amendment, in 1870.
Certain states and other jurisdictions were unreceptive to the changes in the system and instituted policies and procedures designed to making voting more difficult or to deny citizens of the right to vote. The records reflect the existence of poll taxes and literacy tests, as examples of the efforts to keep certain groups from voting, via disenfranchisement.
After the arduous struggle it the historic Civil Rights movement, from 1955 to 1965, Congress enacted The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed into law, by the late President Lyndon B. Johnson, in August of that year, just two years after the 1963 March on Washington.
The new federal legislation’s purpose was to prohibit racial discrimination, in voting, and had a significant impact on the increase in voter registration, voter turnout and election of African Americans, women and minorities, to public offices across America.
In 1980, during Re-authorization of the Act, the Supreme Court held that Section 2 was “a restatement of the 15th Amendment.”
Of the various sections of this legislation, the strongest have been noted as Section 5 and Section 2.
Section 5 established a requirement that state and local government, that fell under Section 4(b) must obtain “pre-clearance” from the federal government before making changes to their election and voting policies to ensure that they would not be discriminatory.
Section 2 prohibits racial discrimination in at – large election schemes , applies to the denial or abridgement of any citizens right to vote, prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups, identified in Section 4 (f)(a) of the Act.
In 2013, the Supreme Court voided Section 5, of the Voting Rights Act, holding that it was unconstitutional to use the coverage formula in Section 4(b), if the Voting Rights Act to determine which jurisdictions are subject to the pre-clearance requirement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Most recently, in November of this year, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that “private litigants” can no longer bring lawsuits, under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In practice, this means that, in the Eighth Circuit, only the United States Attorney General and not private groups, can bring claims under this key provision of the Voting Rights Act, that prohibits discrimination in redistricting and voting. This negatively impacts, in legal terms, the ability of private groups and individuals to bring lawsuits referred to as a “private right of action”.
The plaintiffs, in this action, is the Arkansas State NAACP and they are considering an appeal of this ruling.
We also plan to continue our researching and efforts to keeping the electorate informed!
Elections have both BENEFITS and CONSEQUENCES, but, the former surely enriches us more than the latter.
