Why do you think that the renewal of the Voting Rights Act will do anything to deter what you consider to be the voting abuses of 2000 and 2004, considering they occurred when the Voting Rights Act was active?
And Reagan didn’t oppose renewing the VRA. In fact, he endorsed it. He had, however, when he was running for president, said that Section 5 was"humiliating to the South", and opposed amending the Act. Section 2 had said that in order for a law to be illegal under the VRA, the plantiff had to show a discriminatory intent…in other words, that the state law had been passed to discriminate. The amendments passed in 1982 changed the standard of Section 2 to add an effects test…so that a voting law would be illegal if plantiffs could show that it had the effect of discriminating. They no longer had to show that was the intent of the law. The effects test had already existed in Section 5, but the amendments extended it to Section 2 as well.
Oh, I forgot. The Reagan administration also supported a “buyout” provision in section 5, which would let an area subject to section 5, if they could show that they hadn’t discriminated in voting and took efforts against voting discrimination, to apply to be removed from the provisions of section 5.
I admit I’m not optimistic, but at least the VRA provides for federal oversight of the process and there’s some transparency to it – it’s a tool Dem activists just might be able to use to prevent further voting-roll purges, or disproportionate spoilage of ballots from black precincts (see second link in post #9). If it expires before 2008, we won’t even have that.
Well, no, the only thing that will expire in 2008 is section 5, and none of the states that are subject to section 5 restrictions (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, as well as parts of Florida, New York, California, North Carolina, and South Dakota) are really in play presidentially. I mean, I guess those states could racially discriminate to influence congressional elections, but a lawsuit could still be brought under section 2.
Read the Bradbloig . he has been covering the election fraud for years. The fraud starts by Harris and Blackwell removing voters from the voter rolls. They start it by claiming they are simply removing convicted felons from th erolls, but they removed them ,then any one with a similar name. Then started cleaning out voters in predominantly black or democratic areas.
There was a meeting in which the manufacturer of the voting machines (Diebolt) spoke to his workers and said our mission is to elect George Bush. The machines have no paper trail and studies have shown they are easily tamperered with. Programmers have come out from Diebolt and told about them.
The amount of machines were controlled. Black or Democratic areas had too few machines and 6 hr waiting periods.
Sure, but the only counties in Florida subject to Section 5 are Collier, Hardee, Hendry, and Hillsborough, and of those counties, only Hendry and Hissborough have large black populations (14.75 and 14.96% respectively). The rest of the state isn’t under Section 5.
So what? The winner of Florida’s popular vote contest gets all of Florida’s electoral votes. And the difference there in 2000 was five or six hundred votes.
Yes, but first, the 2000 Florida vote was a historical anomaly. Secondly, Section 5 didn’t prevent any malfeasance from happening in 2000, partly because it didn’t apply statewide, and partly because the alledged malfeasance wasn’t structural, but individual…that’s to seay, for example, that, in itself, removing those not eligible to vote from the voting roles (like convicted felons, for example), is generally allowed under Section 5. What the Republicans are accused of doing, though, is abusing that process, by, instead of doing what they were allowed to do, and actually removing those not eligible to vote, they removed eligible voters because of their race. The proper remedy for that is a lawsuit, provided for in section 2 of the Act. This remedy would still exist even if Section 5 expires.
Further, since the agency authorized to preclear under Section 5 is the Justice Department, if the real purpose of removing the preclearance requirement is to disenfranchise black Democratic voters in key areas, it would be just as easy for Congress to vote to renew the section, and then have the Attorney General rubberstamp all the planned changes in swing areas.