VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 AND ITS AMENDMENTS 79 Stat. 437 (1965) (Update)

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) has been used primarily for two purposes: to guarantee African American voters in the South equal access to the ballot; and to enable racial minorities—especially blacks and Hispanics—to achieve political representation through electing their preferred candidates. Because the first purpose was more quickly achieved, ballot access is called the act's first-generation effect, and representation, the second-generation effect.

First-generation results were most dramatic in Mississippi, where the percentage of blacks registered increased from 6.7 in 1964 to 59.4 in 1968. In seven Southern states covered entirely by the act's preclearance provision, the black/white registration gap decreased from 44.1 percentage points in 1965 to 5 points in 1988. Second-generation results are reflected in the increases in black officeholding in the eleven-state South, where approximately 20 percent of the population is African American. In this region, between 1970 and 1985, the percentage of blacks in Congress increased from 0 to 1.7; in state senates, from 1.3 to 7.2; in state houses, from 1.9 to 10.8; and on city councils, from 1.2 to 5.6.

Increases in black and Hispanic officeholding in the South and Southwest, respectively, resulted largely from drawing majority–minority election districts. These were often created through legal challenges to racial gerryman-dering or to multimember or "at-large" election schemes, where plaintiffs invoked the fourteenth amendment or sections 2 (as amended in 1982) and 5 of the VRA. Essential to this assault on the exclusion of minority-group members from government office was the concept of minority vote dilution which the Supreme Court endorsed in White v. Regester (1973) and later refined in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986).

The 1990s electoral districting resulted in a sharp increase in Southern black members of Congress—from four in 1990 to seventeen in 1994. The U.S. Department of Justice under both Presidents george h. w. bush and william j. clinton had required the creation of more "safe" black districts in the region to comply with the act. Several bizarrely shaped majority-black districts were crafted, and white voters challenged one in North Carolina. Consequently, the Court, most notably in shaw v. reno (1993) and its progeny, developed a theory under which the creation of districts whose predominant purpose is racial is unconstitutional. This controversial new cause of action threw into question the extent to which race-based redistricting, even as a remedy for minority vote dilution, is permissible. Courts have subsequently required that several majority–minority districts be redrawn.

The Shaw cases appear to respond to a growing chorus of criticism of the act's second-generation phase—criticism holding that federal intervention in redistricting to prevent minority vote dilution is either no longer needed or inevitably leads to proportional representation of minority groups, the right to which is expressly denied under section 2 of the VRA. Critics of Shaw fear that because of extensive racially polarized voting in the South and Southwest, the number of black and Hispanic officeholders there will decline.

Chandler Davidson
(2000)

Bibliography

Davidson, Chandler, and Grofman Bernard, eds. 1994 Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act 1965–1990. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Guinier, Lani 1994 The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press.

Issacharoff, Samuel;K arlan, Pamela S., and Pildes, Richard H. 1998 The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process. Westbury, N.Y.: Foundation Press.

Kousser, J. Morgan 1999 Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Lublin, David 1997 The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Pildes, Richard H. 1995 The Politics of Race. Harvard Law Review 108:1359–1392.

Thernstrom, Abigail 1987 Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.