An American University Forum on the Future of the Voting Rights Act
Following are additional excerpts
from the American University forum on voting rights.
Frank Parker: I am
sympathetic with proportional representation, or "PR," systems, and I think that
most of us here are. But I want to list some disadvantages of PR systems and some problems
I have. I don't think they're required by the Voting Rights Act, but in many cases they
are a good idea....
I think the debate over PR highlights the
public choices that are available today. And Shaw v. Reno brings in great emphasis
these are the choices available. First, let's assume that you think that minority
representation is desirable, it's desirable to have black people and Hispanics in
Congress. And fairness in representation as a goal as well.
So that means you have two choices: You
can go with single-member district plans, some of which may result in oddly-shaped
districts, but this is a cost of having minority representation, having fairness in the
electoral process. If you don't like that, the other choice available is PR voting
systems. But it seems to me if we are going to have fair levels of minority
representation, it has to be one or the other. And if we do away with both of them, then
the goal of fairness for minorities and representation is defeated.
Frank Parker is professor at the
District of Columbia School of Law. Previously, he directed the Voting Rights Project of
the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law after litigating in the Lawyers'
Committee Mississippi office from 1968 to 1981. He has published widely on voting rights.
Donald Verrilli, Jr.: One
thing that has struck me about this debate is that either way you go -- single-member
districting or some form of a proportional representation system -- each approach to
vindicating minority voting rights has its own inexorable logic.
If you stay within geographic districting
and you want to maximize your efforts to ensure fairness to minorities in the electoral
process, you push the concept of geography further and further and further. But if you go
in the other direction and use proportional representation systems, particularly if
you start conceiving of using them on a national scale, well, are we going to stop
electing Members of the House of Representatives by state, for example, because why should
those territorial constraints matter anymore?
.... So the odds are that whichever way
you go, you are going to be making pragmatic compromises that take our objectives, which
are laudable objectives, and take our traditions, which embody certain political theory
values that are weighty and need to be considered, and you have got to work them out. I
don't think you solve that problem by saying, Well, proportional representation
versus single-member districts. That is not to say there aren't times when
proportional representation schemes are very effective remedies for particular problems.
Donald Verrilli specializes in Supreme
Court practices, constitutional law and voting rights issues. He represented the State of
Florida in Johnson v. DeGrandy.
David Kairys: What this
leads to, for me, is a need, in the voting context as well as in the voting rights
context, to emphasize this revitalization of democracy. The issue is on the agenda across
the political spectrum. It has been effectively taken over or diverted by the term limit
question. We are in a very conservative period. There is a conservative agenda in this
period that tends to swallow up and divert such vital issues. Discontent about the
political process has so far been effectively channeled into this term limit issue.
But there is a range of democratic reforms
which we could be working on, and we could coalesce with these voting rights issues:
proportional representation; elimination of the role of money in elections; media access
for every candidate in limited equal amounts; elimination of the barriers to voting;
elimination also of ballot access barriers.
David Kairys is a professor at the Temple
University School of Law and has litigated some of the leading civil rights cases over the
past two decades. He is author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: Critique of the
Conservative Supreme Court (New Press, 1993).