Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said Tuesday that he favors less federal oversight of the state’s redistricting process, though the Voting Rights Act has for 55 years required the state to have any change in its electoral processes “pre-cleared” by the Justice Department before they’re implemented.
“I do not think in this day and age that we need pre-clearance from DOJ,” he told reporters and editors at AP Day at the Capital in Richmond. “Remember who has to be discriminating here – the General Assembly, the Senate or the House, or the governor, and I don’t see any of those bodies now or anytime in the future returning to the kind of history that Virginia is rather infamous for.”
“I don’t for a moment mean to suggest that we don’t still have to contend in our society and in Virginia with bigotry – we do,” Cuccinelli said. “But the issue with the Voting Rights Act is, is that creeping into the drawing of lines?”
“I was in the state Senate, [I’ve] worked with most of the folks who are still there in one form or another, and I just don’t think that Virginia needs that oversight at this point,” he said. “I think that we have grown as a commonwealth a great deal over the course of my lifetime…and we’re not in the same place we were in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, even ’70s. The environment has improved rather dramatically, and in our politics more so than necessarily in every heart, which is where you ultimately want the change to occur.”
He acknowledged that no changes could be made to the Voting Rights Act in time to affect the 2011 redistricting process. Congress renewed the act in 2006, extending it to 2031.
Cuccinelli said that he does favor keeping Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is permanent, and allows plaintiffs to file suit over redistricting if they feel it is discriminatory.
