The Voting Rights Act turns 40

Registration, then and now
In March 1965, for example, only 19.3 percent of black eligible voters were registered in Alabama, compared with 69.2 percent of whites, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Alabama secretary of state. 

In 2005, 74 percent of black Alabamans old enough to vote do so, compared with 77 percent of whites.

The Voting Rights Act also enhanced the opportunities of minorities to be candidates as well as voters.

“The facts on the ground in 2005 are different from those on the ground in 1965,” said Edward Blum, a senior fellow at the Center for Equal Opportunity and co-author of a book on the law. “No longer do we have white voters refusing to vote for minority candidates," he said.

“In Texas, we have a Hispanic elected to the Supreme Court and an African American elected as railroad commissioner. In Georgia, we have an African American serving as attorney general. These things were unheard of in 1965.”

Update in 2002
The Voting Rights Act continues to evolve. In 2002, two years after the contentious vote count in the presidential election in Florida and the controversy over “hanging chads,” Congress passed the Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act.

In March 1965, only 19.3 percent of black eligible voters were registered in Alabama, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2005, 74 percent of black Alabamans were registered to vote.

Under the law, signed by President Bush in October 2002, states are receiving almost $4 billion in federal money to replace outdated punch-card and lever voting machines and improve voter education and poll-worker training.

“The immediate consequence of the 2000 elections and its unsettling aftermath was a realization that even 30 years after the Voting Rights Act became law, the nation's election system was not what people thought it was,” Sen. Robert Torricelli said in December 2001.

Envisioning America without it
Given the law’s impact on the nation, it’s tempting to consider how America might have evolved in its absence.

“It’s kind of hard to imagine the country without it,” said Clayborne Carson, editor of the Martin Luther King Papers Project at Stanford University. “It would have put the United States even more out of touch with the trend in the world toward greater involvement and basic political rights.”

Todd F. Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, agrees but said the need for the law has run its course. “America needed the VRA very much 40 years ago but doesn't much anymore,” he said.

“It was a fantastic success, which in part created a political and legal regime that make some of its ‘temporary’ provisions unnecessary,” he said, referring to Section 5 of the law, which still requires states and some municipalities, mostly in the South, to clear any changes in voting policy and procedures with the Justice Department.

That provision will be up for renewal in 2007, but some lawmakers say it is no longer needed.

Impact, foreign and domestic
The Edmund Pettus Bridge was a battleground 40 years ago, the stakes for the nation's future as high that day in 1965 as they were a century earlier, during the Civil War.

‘The contemporary significance of the Voting Rights Act is that it reminds us that democracy is an unfinished experiment.’ — CLAYBORNE CARSON Author, editor of the King Papers Project, Stanford University

Over the years, the lessons of the Voting Rights Act have also assumed a global dimension.

“The contemporary significance of the Voting Rights Act is that it reminds us that democracy is an unfinished experiment,” Carson said. “We talk about the United States being a democratic nation; we talk about nation-building to bring democracy to the rest of the world.

“Once you get away from the notion that the United States represents the ideal of democracy, you'll see there are ways we can improve our own democracy, learning from the rest of the world — as we expect the rest of the world to learn from us.”

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