The Voting Rights Act is an important federal redistricting requirement that ensures our representatives reflect America's racial and ethnic diversity. It enjoys overwhelming bipartisan congressional support. The U.S. Department of Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Redrawing the Lines are excellent sources of information about the Voting Rights Act. Please bear in mind that the law regarding the Voting Rights Act is intricate and cannot possibly be covered in full depth here. Here are some of the important highlights.
Why have a Voting Rights Act?
Following the Civil War, the United States adopted three important amendments to the U.S. constitution. Among these is the 15th Amendment, which states that "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Immediately following the Civil War, the North occupied the South during a period known as Reconstruction. The North enforced the U.S. constitution, and as a result, many African-Americans were elected to state offices across the South. When the North withdrew its forces, White Southerners regained political power at first through violent intimidation during elections to repress African-American voting. Once in power, Whites amended their state constitutions and adopted election laws designed to prevent African-Americans from voting. Some of these rules may be familiar, such as the poll tax or discriminatory application of voter registration and literacy tests. A more obscure discriminatory device was racial gerrymandering.
The Voting Rights Act addressed all of these discriminatory election rules to ensure that our legislatures at all levels of government reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the people they represent. Provisions of the Voting Rights Act have been amended and reauthorized several times to address changing legal and political environments. The most recent reauthorization for another twenty-five years passed by wide bipartisan margins in 2007 -- when Republicans controlled the U.S. Congress and George W. Bush was president. The Voting Rights Act is seen as one of the most successful pieces of legislation, being credited with the election of 9,000 African-Americans, 5,000 Latinos, and numerous Native Americans to local, state, and national offices.
The Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting to prevent states and localities from drawing districts that deny minorities a chance to elect a candidate of their choice. There are two important provisions. Section 2 applies nationally, and Section 5 applies only to certain "covered jurisdictions" which are located primarily in the South. These provisions are discussed in detail below. To understand how Section 2 and Section 5 apply, it is first important to understand how racial gerrymandering works.
What is Racial Gerrymandering?
To understand how to do a racial gerrymander, consider a hypothetical state with thirty-six people in it, which we will call Gerryland. Sixteen Gerrylanders are of a racial minority (represented by tan colored circles) and twenty are the racial majority. There are four districts to be drawn. (Thanks for Justin Levitt, formerly at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, for these diagrams.)
Racially polarized voting is when all the minorities always vote for their preferred candidate and all the majorities always vote for their preferred candidate. If racially polarized voting exists, it is possible to gerrymander with brutal efficiency to ensure minorities have little or no representation in a four-seat legislature. There are two gerrymandering strategies, known as cracking and packing. The same strategies apply to both racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Cracking is when the minority community is fragmented into several districts, none of which have a majority of minorities. When there is racially polarized voting, minorities will be unable to elect a candidate of their choice to the legislature in any district. The cra