New Report: Voting Rights Act Protections Still Needed in Mississippi
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 5/17/2006
Persistent discrimination against black voters throughout Mississippi's history is a central reason why the state has never elected a black senator, despite having the largest percentage of blacks in the country.Discrimination against black voters in Mississippi today stems from slavery and its legacy, according to a new report by RenewtheVRA.org on the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) in the state since its last reauthorization in 1982. Since most whites in Mississippi do not vote for black candidates, regardless of their qualifications, the VRA has played a crucial role in ensuring that blacks can elect their candidate.
Author Robert McDuff states in the report that the VRA guarantees certain protections "and if Mississippi is to move forward in the coming years, the bulwark of legal protections from which they grew must not be dismantled or diminished."
The entire state of Mississippi is required to submit all voting changes to the Department of Justice (DOJ) before enacting them because the state for so long consistently and aggressively denied blacks the right to vote. Since 1969, DOJ has objected 169 times to voting changes in Mississippi--112 of which occurred after the 1982 reauthorization.
Many of DOJ's objections involved efforts to dilute minority voting strength, mostly by creating majority-white districts or changing election procedures to favor white candidates. Because of repeated DOJ objections to these redistricting plans, Mississippi has had at least one black representative in Congress since 1986.
McDuff concludes that Mississippi has a long way to go before voters in black-white elections cast their vote based on non-racial factors. For example, in the 2003 State Treasurer election Gary Anderson, the director of the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration, lost the election with 47 percent of the vote to a 29-year-old white candidate with no experience beyond working in a bank. Of the 57 majority-white counties, Anderson won only 18 and lost 39.
In addition, federal observers have been sent to monitor Mississippi elections on 250 separate occasions since the 1982 reauthorization, the most for any state. Mississippi accounts for 40 percent of the overall elections to which federal observers have been sent since 1982.
The VRA, considered the most successful civil rights legislation ever enacted, prohibits discrimination based on race.
Three key provisions of the VRA will expire in August 2007 if Congress does not act now to renew them: Section 5, which requires preclearance of voting changes in states and localities with a history of voting discrimination, Section 203, which require counties where more than 5 percent of citizens are not native English speakers to provide language assistance, and Sections 6-9, which authorize the Department of Justice to send federal examiners and observers to monitor elections.
A bicameral bill, HR 9/S 2703, introduced on May 2, would reauthorize these provisions for another 25 years.
The RenewtheVRA.org collaborative includes such groups as the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, ACLU, and Asian American Justice Center.
