[EL] Kousser on Shelby County

[Rick Hasen]

<http://electionlawblog.org/>


    Kousser on Shelby County <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=47341>

Posted on February 15, 2013 1:43 pm 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=47341> by Rick Hasen 
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Must-read Morgan Kousser 
<http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/02/15/the-strong-case-for-keeping-section-5/> 
post as part of Reuters Shelby County symposium 
<http://www.reuters.com/subjects/voting-rights>:

    Since 2009, I have been compiling a comprehensive list of voting
    rights incidents. (I have also served as an expert witness in such
    voting rights cases as those challenging the 2011 Texas
    redistricting laws.) The list now has 4,141 incidents: legal cases
    brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act; legal cases
    brought under Section 5 of the act; objections by the Justice
    Department under Section 5 and "more information requests" issued by
    the department as part of the Section 5 process, if they resulted in
    pro-minority changes in election laws; and 14^th Amendment cases.

    Unpublished, as well as published, cases are included in the
    statistics below only if they resulted in changes in the election
    laws that helped minorities. Some are recorded in printed opinions,
    but many resulted in informal or court-approved settlements. In
    other instances, merely filing a lawsuit led to the changes in
    election laws that minority plaintiffs sought. This is a far larger
    number of incidents than in any database referred to in the Shelby
    County briefs.

    What do these numbers reveal about the central issue that the
    Supreme Court asked the parties in Shelby County to address: the
    adequacy of the Section 5 coverage scheme. Section 5 mandates that
    certain states, counties or townships are barred from changing
    election laws without the approval of the Justice Department or the
    District Court of the District of Columbia.

    First, 90 percent of the 4,141 incidents and 93.4 percent of the
    3,775 "successful" incidents -- those that resulted in changes to
    election law that advanced minorities' voting rights -- took place
    in the jurisdictions covered by Section 5. This may not be
    surprising, since 2,368 of the incidents were Section 5 objections
    or enforcement actions, or "more information" requests. These, by
    definition, can take place only in covered jurisdictions.

    More instructive is the portion of the 1,256 successful Section 2
    cases that arose in jurisdictions subject to oversight: 83.3
    percent. Section 2 cases can be filed anywhere in the country. The
    number of successful Section 2 cases is far larger than that in the
    much-cited database compiled by Ellen Katz, a law professor at of
    the University of Michigan (which is subsumed in my list), and the
    proportion from covered jurisdictions is considerably higher than
    Katz found in published cases. This is because I included many
    unpublished cases that resulted in settlements, either in-court or
    out-of-court.

And don't miss the important graphic. 
<http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/files/2013/02/sect_5_objections-revise.jpg>

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-- 
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen at law.uci.edu
http://law.uci.edu/faculty/page1_r_hasen.html
http://electionlawblog.org

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