| Subject: news of the day 8/5/05 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 8/5/2005, 9:44 AM |
| To: election-law |
Cox News Service offers this
report. A snippet: "'All over America there are efforts to restrict
access to the vote under the guise of preventing voter fraud. And I say
guise — look at this Georgia bill, all the ID you've got to produce to
register to vote,' [former President] Clinton said at the opening
session of the National Association of Black Journalists convention at
the downtown Hyatt Regency hotel."
Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Voting
Rights Act. Many news outlets are doing retrospectives. Here is a
sampling: NPR;
San
Francisco Chronicle; and the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
NPR's Morning Edition offers this
preview. If anyone is aware of an audio feed of the oral argument
(several news organizations requested permission for the feed), please
pass it on.
The Des Moines Register offers this
report, which begins: "A judge on Wednesday rejected a request to
dismiss a lawsuit challenging Gov. Tom Vilsack’s order to restore
voting rights to convicted felons who have finished their sentences."
Ed Whelan (who may not remember that his office was next to mine
when he was an associate and I was a summer associate many years ago at
Munger, Tolles and Olson) writes
in response to my oped that there is good reason to believe that Judge
Roberts would be more hospitable to a renewed section 5 of the Voting
Rights Act than he was to the proposed section 2: "The answer, as it
happens, is provided in the very documents that Hasen has been
reviewing. As Roberts explained in 1982, section 2 and section 5 'are
addressed to different problems. It makes sense to have an effects test
[in section 5] for election law changes in certain areas which suffer
from a history of election law discrimination. Section 2 is not so
limited.'"
The problem is that Judge Roberts wrote those words in 1982, when there
was still ample evidence that jurisdictions covered under section 5
were engaged in intentional race discrimination in voting, and before
the "New Federalism" revolution on the Rehnquist Court, making it much
harder for Congress to impose requirements (like preclearance) on the
states. In part, the problem is that the Voting Rights Act has been so
effective that it is hard to find evidence of intentional state
discrimination on the basis of race in voting, even if it would
reemerge if section 5 were allowed to sunset. I term this the "Bull
Connor is Dead" problem in my forthcoming article,
Congressional Power to Renew the Preclearance Provisions of the Voting
Rights Act after Tennessee v. Lane, 66 Ohio State Law Journal ___
(forthcoming 2005). An updated and revised version of the article will
appear in the book, The Future of the Voting Rights Act, edited by
Epstein, O'Halloran, Pildes and de la Garza.
-- Rick Hasen William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law Loyola Law School 919 Albany Street Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211 (213)736-1466 - voice (213)380-3769 - fax rick.hasen@lls.edu http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html http://electionlawblog.org