House Democrats said they will vote next week on legislation that would require certain states to preclear changes to their voting laws with federal authorities.
The stated purpose of the legislation, House Resolution 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, is to ward off discriminatory voting procedures, but that’s a ruse, said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. The real purpose of H.R. 4 is to “weaponize the progressive litigation machine” to target voting laws the Democrats don’t like, he said.
“They are using standards that are much less fact based than before and much more expansive,” Snead told the Austin Journal. “It’s in large part a measure of how often a state or local government entity gets sued for voting rights infractions. This has nothing to do with Jim Crow or poll taxes.”
Preclearance under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, targeting Southern states for the most part, was effectively shot down in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Shelby County (in Shelby County v. Holder) that the coverage formula, section 4(b) of the law, that determined which states had to preclear their laws, was outdated. The Democrats introduced H.R. 4 to address that decision by enacting a new coverage formula.
The trouble, Snead said, is that the bill contains no objective measure for determining which state should undergo preclearance.
“If they relied on objective data, they would find that Massachusetts would be a preclearance state but not Georgia since black voter turnout there is double what it is in Massachusetts,” he said. “That’s the last thing they want.”
Snead added that making the number of lawsuits a standard of preclearance encourages litigation that targets certain state and local governments.
“It’s so hard to prove voter discrimination using objective measures since there is no longer voter suppression going on,” he said.
Snead also said to expect provisions from House Resolution 1, the sweeping elections bill called the For the Peoples Act, to be inserted in H.R. 4. The House passed H.R. 1 in March, but it has stalled in the Senate. Conservative and Republican critics contend that H.R. 1 would strip the states of their constitutional authority to determine their own election procedures, and would give Democrats an unfair advantage in national, state and local elections.