President Barack Obama commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a speech Thursday as he called for members of Congress and state legislatures to make it easier for people to vote.
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The celebration of the Voting Rights Act came a day after a federal appeals panel struck down a strict voter ID law in Texas, saying it was “discriminatory” and intended to discourage blacks and Hispanics from voting.
The Voting Rights Act has been renewed four times since with little fanfare, most recently in 2006, when Congress overwhelmingly voted to extend the law another 25 years.
“These new so-called laws to stop voter fraud and bring back voter integrity are nothing more than modern day voter suppression schemes to limit access to the ballot for the youth, the elderly, and people of color”, Moore said. Today, certain jurisdictions must provide bilingual or multilingual polling places to serve all voters, despite their native languages.
Since the 2013 court decision, lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives have introduced two bills to restore Voting Rights Act protections, both of which are still pending.
The landmark law also eliminated literacy tests and other Jim Crow tactics and – in a key provision called Section 5 – required state, county and local governments with histories of discrimination to submit any changes to voting laws to federal authorities for approval.
“This historic decision makes clear that states can not impose needless and discriminatory burdens on the right to vote”.
Still, Catrena Norris Carter and Callie Greer believe overall the Voting Rights Act achieved what it set out to do 50 years later.
“If the voter photo ID law affected the outcome of any 2014 federal race in Texas, it would have been in CD-23”. Elfant said the majority of those voters were students at the University of Texas who did not have a Texas driver’s license.
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
“Fifty years since passage of the VRA, it remains clear that the struggle for the right to vote is not over”, the Congressional Black Caucus said in an e-mailed statement.
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This remains true, especially since those states on the existing oversight list wound up there based on minority voter turnout and registration from the presidential election in 1964.
