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Introduction:
The Right to Vote
Fundamental to any democracy is
the right to an effective vote. All voters should have equal voting
power, and, ideally, all voters should have an equally realistic
opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The United States
Constitution, particularly its Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,
and the Voting Rights Act (VRA) have been the primary means to
guarantee the right to an effective vote. Adopted in 1965, the VRA
(see next page) sought to eliminate barriers to African Americans'
ability to cast ballots ��� such as tactics to prevent voter
registration ��� mainly in the South. The law's success in breaking
down these barriers led to amendments which extended voting rights
protections to other racial and ethnic groups. In 1982, new
amendments to the VRA clarified its power to ensure that protected
racial minorities can cast an effective vote. Access to the ballot
is obviously fundamentally important, but under certain
circumstances it still was not enough to prevent racial minorities
from being effectively excluded from representation. The amendments
��� particularly Section 2 of the VRA ��� went beyond access to the
ballot to the next step: enabling access to representation for
protected minorities facing electoral discrimination. The vehicle to
achieve this access to representation generally was through drawing
���minority opportunity��� districts ��� single-member districts in which
members of the protected racial or ethnic group made up a majority
of adults in the district. After more than three decades of
litigation and change, the VRA arguably has been the most effective
piece of civil rights legislation in our nation���s history. Its
effectiveness can be measured in large increases in voter
participation of people of color and in the rapidly growing presence
of elected officials of color at all levels of government. The chief
target of lawsuits brought under Section 2 of the VRA to increase
opportunities for racial minorities to elect candidates has been
winner-take-all, at-large voting systems. (Please see glossary for
definitions of all terms used in this manual.) In jurisdictions
using these systems, a slim majority of 50.1% of voters has the
power to elect all representatives. Candidates compete for a
designated number of seats ��� sometimes with ���numbered posts��� that
result in a series of separate elections for one seat each and
sometimes "at large" with all candidates competing against one
another. In both of these traditional at-large methods, voters have
as many votes as there are seats, and those in the majority have the
power to elect every winning candidate and defeat the choices of
voters in the minority. Consider, for example, a town where 60% of
the voters are white and 40% are African American and where few
white voters will support candidates favored strongly by African
American voters. In a race for five seats on the city council, a
winner-take-all, at-large voting system would allow the white
majority to defeat all candidates supported by the African-American
community, even if those candidates won the votes of every single
African American. The white community's 60% of votes easily could
result in 100% of representation. To remedy this unfairness, the
traditional approach has been conversion of at-large voting systems
to single-member districts. To elect its five-seat city council, our
hypothetical town would be divided into five different geographic
areas of roughly equal population. Each area ��� or ���district��� ��� would
have one representative. While still a ���winner-take-all��� system ���
where 50.1% of votes wins 100% of representation ��� districts often
can be formed so that a racial minority makes up the majority of
voters in one or more districts and thus can elect a representative
and hold that representative accountable. In southern
jurisdictions, where African Americans are by far the largest
minority, this generally means the creation of black-majority
districts ��� of "black opportunity" districts, as the percentage of
black voters necessary to assure their representation can vary
depending on the jurisdiction. In 1991-1992, congressional districts
with majorities of black voters were drawn for the first time in the
20th century in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, South
Carolina and Alabama. It was no accident that in the 1992 elections,
these states elected their first black Members of Congress of the
century. The impact of Shaw v. Reno on minority opportunity
districts: In 1993, in the Shaw v. Reno case involving congressional
districts in North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that drawing
districts primarily based on racial factors could be
constitutionally suspect. This ruling threatens to reverse or at
least dramatically slow the electoral advances made since 1982 by
African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups protected by
the Voting Rights Act. In Shaw and a series of subsequent decisions,
the Court made it more difficult ��� although not impossible, as most
clearly demonstrated in the Cromartie case in 2001 ��� for legislators
to create minority opportunity districts and more difficult for the
Department of Justice to act to protect and enhance minority voting
rights. The creation of minority opportunity districts has been
responsible for electing many more candidates of choice of African
Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Pacific Americans ���
resulting in hundreds of victories by candidates from those
communities. Now these districts may be vulnerable to challenges
based on the Shaw line of rulings. Explaining
Sections 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act
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