Civil Rights Leaders Greet Election Reform with Guarded Praise
Feature Story by Katie Drake & Rob Randhava - 4/15/2002
Senate passage of the Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act of 2001 (S. 565) met with mixed reviews from the civil rights community, one of the largest proponents of election reform in the wake of the 2000 election debacle.The concern, said Wade Henderson, Executive Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), is that "While S. 565 contains many improvements over the House-passed Ney-Hoyer legislation, several provisions in the bill as currently written raise serious concerns and would weaken - rather than strengthen - fundamental provisions of the Voting Rights Act."
Ney-Hoyer, or H.R. 3295, passed the House in December 2001. It was opposed by a majority of civil rights organizations because it lacked sufficient provisions regarding accessibility issues for language minorities and the disabled, purge protections and measures to prevent voter disenfranchisement, among other concerns.
Henderson identified a requirement that first-time voters must provide a driver's license or other identification when voting as a key point civil rights leaders want addressed while the bills are in conference committee. "In addition to causing many low-income voters to be turned away at the polls if they cannot obtain a drivers license or other identification, thus in many ways working like a poll tax, the photo ID requirement will lead to discrimination against minority voters even when they possess a valid form of ID. Election officials will be given far too much discretion to decide whether an ID presented by a voter is valid and sufficiently proves the voter's identity," said Henderson.
Raul Yzaguierre of the National Council of La Raza elaborated on the ID requirement's potential for discrimination, "Research shows that this requirement could prevent as many as 1.3 million new Latino voters from participating in the electoral process. Real election reform is desperately needed to ensure that what happened to millions of predominantly minority voters in 2000 never happens again. Therefore, the photo ID requirement that remains in the final version of the bill is truly unfortunate as it will exacerbate, rather than fix, this problem. That the photo ID requirement is effective immediately while the other provisions of the bill which help remove barriers to voting may take up to ten years to go into effect is a grave injustice to the millions of voters - especially minority, elderly, and disabled voters - who will be affected adversely by this provision."
An amendment offered by Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) to minimize the discriminatory impact of this provision, by allowing voters to verify their identity through a signature or an attestation, was filibustered by a minority of the Senate membership and was ultimately withdrawn. Other provisions of concern include a "safe harbor" provision that allows states to delay implementing many of the bill's standards for 6 years - after several more federal elections, including the 2004 presidential election; and a provision that removes National Voter Registration Act safeguards, including important voter registration standards.
"We hope that Congress will vote for truly equal voting rights," Henderson said, "by fixing these provisions in the Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act. Most of the bill's provisions - its minimum federal standards for voting machines, significant federal funding for polling places, provisional ballots and statewide computerized registration lists - are simply too important to go to waste by the existence of 'poison pill' provisions like the ID requirement in the bill."
