Seeing federal courts slash away at the Voting Rights Act, some states are seeking to resurrect fallen protections for non-white voters with their own versions of the landmark law passed during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Democratic lawmakers in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey are pushing such legislation this session, attempting to join seven other states with similar laws enacted in recent years.
But carrying these bills to law will be a tall task for lawmakers, even in blue states. Michigan’s Voting Rights Act legislation died in the state House after passing the Senate last year. And active bills in Democratic-led states are not guaranteed passage this year because of legal concerns.
New York’s and Washington state’s voting rights acts have survived legal challenges over the past two years.
Since then, the federal Voting Rights Act has been used by courts and the U.S. Department of Justice to protect non-white voters from policies and redistricting schemes that made it harder for them to vote or diluted their political power.
But federal courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — have whittled away those protections in recent decades, claiming the discrimination that led to the law no longer exists. In 2013, the high court cleaved off a major portion of the law’s enforcement mechanism that kept jurisdictions that had historically discriminated against Black people from enacting measures that could once again keep them from the polls.
Posted by John3262005