US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, on Monday submitted a 20-page statement urging the House Judiciary Committee to implement, enforce, revitalize, and restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“the Act”).
The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson to confront the fact that nearly a century after the Reconstruction Amendments, “millions of citizens were still denied the ability to register, to vote, and to participate fully in American democracy because of their race.”
Clarke stated to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (“the Subcommittee”) that the civil rights issues faced today while different are “equally pressing.” Clarke added:
If the end of the twentieth century was a period of dramatic expansion in voting rights, the twenty-first century has, so far, been a period of rising attacks on voting rights. We have seen cutbacks to early voting periods; imposition of additional requirements to cast ballots, either at polling places or with respect to absentee ballots; and new restrictions on the right of civic groups to assist citizens in participating fully in the electoral process…The 2020 Census numbers show that the United States is an increasingly diverse nation. This raises profound questions about how the next redistricting will be conducted, including whether the officials who draw congressional and legislative maps and decide districts for city councils and county commissions draw districts that are fair to all voters.
The census numbers Clarke refers to showed that for the first time the White population decreased in absolute numbers from 196 million to 191 million between 2010 and 2020—a decrease of 8.6%. The data also showed that the number of people who identified as belonging to two or more races more than tripled from 9 million 33.8 million during the same period—a 276% increase. Some demographers see this as a sign that the White population did not shrink as much as shift to multiracial identities. In any event, many have expressed fear that these developments might further fuel White Nationalist sentiments.
Clarke also criticized the current practice of challenging restrictive voting measures on a case-by-case basis as “complex and resource intensive,” and highlighted the need to return to the “preclearance” mechanism of § 5 of the Act. With preclearance, the Department of Justice (DOJ) had the authority to block and did block a voting change that a jurisdiction failed to show had “neither a discriminatory purpose nor a discriminatory effect.” This discouraged most jurisdictions from proposing such changes in the first place; and when they did attempt to implement discriminatory changes during the preclearance era, “the DOJ’s 3,000+ objections protected the rights of millions of citizens.”
Warning that voting rights are under pressure to an extent not seen since the civil rights era, Clarke urged Congress to exercise its broad enforcement powers to restore the Act now or risk “backsliding into a nation where millions of citizens, particularly citizens of color, find it difficult to register, cast their ballot and elect candidates of choice…”
This statement comes after the Supreme Court upheld a pair of restrictive Arizona voting laws in July along what appeared to be partisan lines that weakened the Act’s reach. That decision has been widely criticized, including by an angry trio of dissenting justices who accused the majority of “yet again” rewriting laws intended to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.”
