This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke out with an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, urging Congress to imminently enact new protections for voting rights. Specifically, Garland lauded the previously in place rule under which federal authorities were required to pre-approve certain changes to the conducting of elections before those changes could go into effect. The hope with this rule was that federal authorities could block at least some instances of voter suppression before they even got going — and indeed, Garland says, “the Justice Department blocked thousands of discriminatory voting changes that would have curtailed the voting rights of millions of citizens in jurisdictions large and small” thanks to the requirement.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially set the rule aside, leaving federal authorities with significantly less power in their efforts to stop local officials from imposing rules around elections that amounted to voter suppression. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which Congress is slated to soon take up for consideration, would re-impose that previous strict requirement.
In the Post, Garland wrote as follows:
‘Our society is shaped not only by the rights it declares but also by its willingness to protect and enforce those rights. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of voting rights… [The] Justice Department is using all its current legal authorities to combat a new wave of restrictive voting laws. But if the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision were still operative, many of those laws would likely not have taken effect in the first place.’
Under Garland’s leadership, the Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against state authorities in Georgia over a slate of restrictive voting provisions that Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp recently signed into law. Troublingly, those new provisions even include new guidelines by which state officials could essentially take over local election operations in the event of the discovery of certain types of mismanagement of the electoral process by the local county officials. The range of restrictive election provisions that the preclearance provision allowed federal officials to stop was broad — Garland explains how, for instance, the Justice Department blocked a city in Mississippi in 1997 from moving the polling place for a Black community to somewhere less easily accessible to those served by it.
It’s unclear how well that efforts in Congress to protect voting rights may fare — but in the meantime, Garland added as follows, referencing this week’s anniversary of the Voting Rights Act’s enactment as law:
‘On this anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, we must say again that it is not right to erect barriers that make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote. And it is time for Congress to act again to protect that fundamental right.’
Read Garland’s article at this link.
