PASADENA — For the last few years, a flagrantly untrue rumor that African Americans will be disfranchised in 2007 has been circulating on the Internet, surviving innumerable efforts to deny it and even a full-scale press conference by the Congressional Black Caucus.
The factual basis for the rumor is that two important parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act are scheduled to expire in 2007, unless Congress extends them by that time. The two key parts are Section 4, which bans literacy tests, and Section 5, which requires officials in certain states and counties, mostly in the South, to clear new election laws with the Justice Department before putting them into force. But even the expiration of these sections would not disfranchise blacks, because the 15th Amendment, which bans restrictions on voting "on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude," is part of the U.S. Constitution, and there is no prospect of outright repeal.
Why, then, does the rumor persist?
In large part, its persistence is due to a general unease created by continuing assaults on affirmative-action policies and, especially, on minority political power, spearheaded by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. A case argued before the court last Wednesday, Reno vs. Bossier Parish School Board, illustrates the trend.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires that, before an election law from one of the "covered jurisdictions" can go into effect, the Justice Department or the district court of the District of Columbia, must determine that it "does not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color." In a 1976 case, the Supreme Court ruled that an election law couldn't be thrown out under Section 5 unless it actually made minorities worse off (had a "retrogressive effect," as the court put it) or unless it was intended to discriminate. For example, if a city council contained one district in which minorities constituted a majority, then a new districting plan that kept that single "majority-minority" seat would not violate Section 5, even if other majority-minority districts could have been drawn, as long as the new plan wasn't intentionally discriminatory.
