You'd think by the vicious rhetoric at the march that President Bush was trying to revoke the Act. Nothing of the sort is true. Most sections of the landmark legislation are permanent, including the ban on literacy tests, once a favorite method to keep qualified black voters from exercising their right to vote. Certain provisions of the Act -- most notably Section 5, which requires covered jurisdictions to submit even the most minor changes in voting procedures to the Department of Justice for pre-clearance -- will expire in 2007, but they were always meant to be temporary. Indeed, these provisions might have been declared unconstitutional, despite the incredible recalcitrance of Southern politicians in 1965, but for the promise that they would expire after a time.
Congress should drop the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act and another section enacted in 1975 requiring non-English ballots to be provided in some jurisdictions. The pre-clearance provision makes little sense today. There is no evidence that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 -- many of them now governed by African-American politicians -- would try to disenfranchise black voters.
And non-English ballots were a bad idea in 1975 and an even worse one today. The Hispanic population in 1975 was predominantly U.S.-born and English-speaking. Today, there are virtually no U.S.-born Hispanics or other minorities who do not speak, read and write English. Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born -- about half of adults in this group -- English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship. As for the relatively small number of eligible voters who can't read an English ballot well enough to make an informed decision, letting such voters bring someone into the ballot booth to assist them would be far more efficient than printing up millions of ballots in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, and other languages.
The irony is that no prominent Republican politician is even suggesting that Section 5 or the bilingual ballot provisions of the Voting Rights Act not be extended when they expire in 2007. To the contrary, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Tom Delay and Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner want these provisions extended another 25 years. But that won't stop some demagogues from spewing hate and spreading lies.