Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner is calling for a reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act to prevent the suppression of votes, years after the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the historic law.
“If Congress doesn’t act soon, 2016 will be the first time since 1964 that the United States will elect a president without the full protections of the law. Modernizing the act to address the Supreme Court’s concerns should be one of Congress’ highest priorities,” the Wisconsin Republican wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday.
Sensenbrenner, who once chaired the Judiciary Committee, blamed a 2013 Supreme Court decision that he said gutted the 1965 voting law after its reauthorization under his supervision in 2006.
In a 5-4 ruling in 2013, the highest court struck down a VRA provision known as pre-clearance that required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get approval from the federal government to change any voting rules. The Supreme Court said the list of states and counties affected by the pre-clearance requirement was outdated and unconstitutional, and said Congress needed to update that list.
“There is no adequate remedy for voter discrimination after an election because there is no way to know who would have won absent discrimination,” Sensenbrenner wrote of the decision.
Last year, Sensenbrenner introduced the Voting Rights Act of 2015 as a response to that 2013 Supreme Court decision. He wrote that his bill, which has been stuck in the House, would modernize the VRA “so that the pre-clearance rules applied equally to every state in the country.”
“[T]he bill responds to the Supreme Court’s concerns about the dated formula and resurrects the protections of the law that have been a part of American elections for five decades,” Sensenbrenner wrote.
Sensenbrenner cited the recent voting issue in Arizona, where because of “fewer resources devoted to voting,” thousands of people waited hours to vote in both the Democratic and Republican primaries.
His bill “would have ensured that meaningful debate over polling stations happened before the primary,” Sensenbrenner asserted. “More people might have voted. Would that have changed the results? We’ll never know.”
Since the 2010 election, 16 states have added new voting restrictions — Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas Virginia, and Wisconsin — according to the Brennan Center at New York University’s School of Law.
