Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)

July 23, 2005, Saturday, Metro Edition

Landmark voting act comes up for debate

By: Bob von Sternberg; Staff Writer
Forty years after its enactment, the federal Voting Rights Act might seem to be old news, etched in legalistic stone.

Far from it.

If portions of the law aren't periodically reauthorized by Congress, they expire, which is next scheduled in 2007.

As a result, civil rights advocates are hopscotching around the nation, gathering evidence to keep the act intact. Members of the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act arrived in Minneapolis on Friday for a daylong hearing.

"There's bipartisan consensus that the Voting Rights Act ought to be extended," said commission chairman Bill Lann Lee, a former assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration. "What we need to find out is what the actual record is and whether the act needs to be improved."

Commission members were addressed by representatives from Minnesota and 13 other Midwest and Plains states. They heard anecdotes ranging from gerrymandering in Chicago to vote suppression among blacks in Milwaukee and Arab-Americans in Michigan.

Mark Ritchie, a voter registration activist from Minneapolis and a DFL candidate for Minnesota secretary of state next year, told commissioners that the Legislature last year clamped down on polling place challenges that had in past years "resulted in altercations over very aggressive challenges."

Two Democratic members of Congress from Missouri submitted written testimony, with both referring to the presidential electoral problems in Florida five years ago.

"After that, it's absurd to argue that fraud does not exist," said U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay. "How can anyone claim no discrimination exists in the voting process?"

Added Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver: "The Voting Rights Act is mother's milk for African-Americans' political power."

Lee said it's "an urban legend" that minority group members will lose the right to vote if the law is not reauthorized, noting that the right is guaranteed by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

However, two provisions of the act, one involving jurisdictions with documented histories of voter intimidation and the other requiring multilingual language assistance, are set to expire in two years.

Jurisdictions in all or part of 16 states required literacy tests and had low voter turnout before passage of the act. The law treats that as intimidation of minority voters. But in this region, that applies to only to three counties in South Dakota.

Language assistance is required in 37 counties in the region, and Ritchie noted the recent growth of foreign-language speakers in Minnesota.

Asked by Lee whether he was advocating expansion of that assistance in Minnesota, Ritchie said no consensus exists among voting officials and advocates. "But we've started talking about it," he said