News Release

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) today hailed the signing of legislation to extend the Voting Rights Act for 25 years.

“I came of age in the '60s,” said Spratt, “and I remember the Congress then, with a mere handful of African-American members. I compare that to the Congress I serve in today, with 43 African-Americans, including Jim Clyburn, Mel Watt, and John Lewis.  That did not just happen with time; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it possible.

“As an original co-sponsor of this legislation, I am pleased to see it pass both houses without major modification and be signed by the President.”

The legislation extends the expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act for 25 years. It includes a requirement that states with a history of voter discrimination pre-clear any voting law changes with the federal government, and a requirement that states provide bilingual assistance to non-English-speaking voters. It also effectively overturns two recent Supreme Court decisions regarding federal standards in approving redistricting plans.

History of the Voting Rights Act

After the Civil War, the states ratified the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, which granted African-American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Despite, or perhaps because of, this amendment, states and local governments, particularly in the South, took up tactics to restrict the participation of non-white voters. These tactics included requiring voters to pass literacy tests, take moral character tests, or to interpret or recite the U.S. Constitution in order to cast a ballot.
 
With the advent of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Congress enacted several civil-rights laws designed to reduce racial discrimination. Voting impediments remained widespread, however, in part because they had been written into some states' constitutions.
 
In March 1965, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., led a voting-rights protest in Selma, Alabama, which police put down with violent force. The protest was televised, and prompted an emotional outcry across the country. Five days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Congress to enact a voting rights law.

The Voting Rights Act, P.L. 89-110, finally enacted in August 1965. The law requires the federal government to issue "pre-clearance" before jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices can change voting procedures. It also allows the Justice Department to assign observers to monitor elections to ensure fairness.

The affected states challenged the constitutionality of the law, but the Supreme Court upheld it in 1966 in ruling in South Carolina v. Katzenback. The court found the Voting Rights Act an "uncommon exercise of congressional power," but also found that "exceptional conditions" justified Congress's authority in enacting legislation to remedy voting discrimination.

In 1975, Congress enacted a seven-year re-authorization of the law, adding a provision that requires states to provide bilingual assistance in areas that have a significant number of voters with limited English. In 1982, Congress re-authorized the law for another 25 years, and included a provision stipulating that a jurisdiction is in violation of the law if any voting procedure has the effect of discriminating against minority voters, whether or not the procedure was intended to discriminate. This provision essentially overrode a 1980 Supreme Court ruling (City of Mobile v. Bolden), which found that a plaintiff had to show that a voting procedure was intended specifically to discriminate against non-whites.

In 1992, Congress re-authorized the provision of the law relating to language-minority voters, and expanded the provision to require states to provide both bilingual election materials and bilingual voting assistance. The re-authorization also established a numerical threshold of at least 10,000 non-English-speaking voters to trigger bilingual assistance, rather than the previous standard of 5% of the population.

Since that time, Supreme Court rulings have affected several more aspects of the law. In 1997, the court ruled in Reno v. Bossier Parish School Board that the Justice Department or court can refuse to pre-clear a voting practice only if the practice results in "retrogression” – meaning that non-white voters fare worse under the new policy than the previous one. And in 2003, the Supreme Court held in Georgia v. Ashcroft that the Justice Department or court can pre-clear a voting practice in certain cases if the overall influence of minority voters is not diminished, regardless of minority voters' ability to elect certain candidates.

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