Bailing Out of the Voting Rights Act
By Mike Asmus
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas Texas & Washington have tussled under the lights of the National Voting Rights Act now and again during the laws 45-year history. Many other jurisdictions under the acts purview have as well and many more scrimmages are sure to be put in play before the voting act comes up for Congressional renewal in 2031.
Congress passed the act in 1965 to stop practices clearly or seemingly blocking would-be voters from the ballot box. Up to this time poll taxes literacy tests imaginative redistricting and other such sidesteps to the U.S. Constitution were routinely put before a vast swath of the voting-age population (primarily minorities but also poor whites). Places purported to be using such tactics and in which fewer than 50 percent of the eligible voting population was in fact registered at that time were put under the acts purview.
Texas is one of several states on this roster and is joined on the bench by many other counties townships and cities from across the nation.
One of the voting acts prime tenets is that entities on this roster must submit to Washington any proposed changes to the way elections are held. Known under the act as preclearance the process involves the feds reviewing proposed changes ranging from how a voter registers to where a voter votes to what district boundary lines look like.
And so it is that Texas lawmakers will be sending Washington the maps they develop this coming session showing proposed new district lines for state legislative and U.S. House districts.
But when a state is under the voting act its not just the statehouse that must get proposed changes pre-cleared; any publicly elected governing or administrating body in the covered state initially falls under the act. School districts county commissions city boards library districts and so on.
Jurisdictions may ask to be removed from the acts coverage under a provision known as bailout. (Perhaps not the most apt term as it more
readily calls to mind jumping out of an imperiled plane or in todays political theater your tax dollars used to prop up a bank on Wall Street.)
Jurisdictions applying for bailout status must demonstrate a lengthy history of not applying discriminatory practices in the election process for which they are responsible.
But as with all things bound in bureaucracy just which jurisdictions may apply to bail out has itself proved a tough nut to crack. The U.S. Supreme Court last year infused broad latitude in the bailout application process by ruling on a case involving a small utility district in central Texas.
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 was established to serve a largely suburban community in which the first houses didnt appear until the 1980s. Votes for district board members and ballot questions were cast in a homeowners garage through 2002.
Perhaps precipitated by the arrival of a larger or a second car to be garaged the board subsequently wanted to change the polling location. But falling under the voting act the district had to file for preclearance on the proposed change.
The district was ultimately given approval to move the polling place. But board members were chagrined at having to seek pre-approval in the first place for a relatively minor change in a relatively new and small district void of discriminatory electoral history.
The principle of the matter still chafing the board filed to opt out of the voting acts purview under the bailout provision. A federal court denied the application on the grounds that as the utility district did not register voters it did not qualify for bailout consideration.
Supreme Court justices overruled the lower court in June of 2009.
To distill and condense the 8-1 majority opinion if a jurisdiction could be covered by the act as a whole it was covered by the acts individual
provisions and definitions and could apply for bailout. (Having landed on a page of Voting Rights Act history the scrappy little precedent-setting utility district was dissolved earlier this year after being absorbed by a larger one.)
Texas lawmakers sending their map of proposed new legislative district boundaries to Washington in 2003 knew opting out as a state was not in the cards. The area was too large the history too punctuated the act of changing boundary lines too great.
They also knew sending in a map just two years after an earlier one was unusual in the traditionally decennial process of redistricting.
The 2003 map submission and the subsequent related deliberations created a one-cycle map spurred yet a third map for the decade and brought to light the jumbo shrimp of redistricting terminology: majority minority.
Dont bail out; the next chapters coming soon ...
A former mayor & State Senate Communications Director Mike Asmus managed the 2010 congressional campaign of Donna Campbell who remains in the hunt for 2012.
