Arizona’s Challenge to the Constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act

    
     Arizona is challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, arguing that it treats states differently and continues to impose severe, burdensome restrictions on Arizona that are no longer necessary, according to an article by the Conservative News Service.

     As I mentioned in an my post, Happy Independence Day, in July of 2009, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2009/07/happy-independence-day.html, about a challenge by a Texas polling locality, even the most minor changes to voting procedures are subject to federal review. In that case, the United States Supreme Court did loosen some of the restrictions.

     The CNS article reported that Arizona argues that the Act, with which Arizona has complied by printing ballots in Spanish since 1973, has different standards for counting residents of Hispanic heritage and assumes that anyone with Hispanic surnames cannot speak English.

     As a resident and political activist of a city with a large Hispanic population, Reading, Pennsylvania, I have personal knowledge of some of the particular problems of how this law is being executed in regard to protecting Hispanic voters from discrimination. In addition to requiring that all city ballots be printed in Spanish, the Justice Department counts as “Hispanic” by guessing that anyone whose name sounds Hispanic probably is, whether or not it is. The feds also count non-Hispanic females who marry Hispanics and take Hispanic surnames. The Justice Department uses these inflated figures in order to reach a 10% threshold per precinct to require that precinct to have an interpreter – at local taxpayer expense. An additional factor is the reduction of the anti-fraud practice of purging of voter rolls because of the Motor Voter Act, which is particularly inflationary of the number of Hispanic voters, who tend to be transient. For example, it is not uncommon for the previous occupants of a housing unit to still be registered at that address, as well as the ones before them!

     The reason the feds believed there was discrimination in the first place in Reading is questionable. Not only, as Arizona implies, is the Justice Department itself prejudicial against Hispanics because it assumes they cannot read English, but it is also prejudicial against election workers by assuming they are necessarily prejudicial. Assuming that a class of people (e.g. non-Hispanic election workers, whites, Southerners, etc.) is prejudiced, is itself a form of prejudice. The feds assume that problems encountered by Hispanic voters are necessarily because of prejudice, but the problem with these mostly Democratic election officials is not usually discrimination, but either incompetence or conscientiousness about carrying out election law, which is a particularly challenging task in regard to new voters coming from different cultures. For example, Puerto Rican voters tend to vote at the nearest school, as they do in Puerto Rico, but it is often not their precinct’s polling place. Also, Hispanics often use more variations of their names than non-Hispanics (especially because of the custom of using their mother’s maiden name, and, if so, whether or not to hyphenate it after their surname). Elections workers simply doing their jobs by directing Hispanics to their correct polling place instead of issuing them provisional ballots or questioning their identity when their names do not match is considering “discrimination” by the feds. 

     I shall take this opportunity to question the usefulness of printing ballots in Spanish or any other language that uses the Latin alphabet, as a candidate’s name in English is the same in Spanish, for example, with only the names of the offices and instructions needing translation. Such translations are usually provided separately already, which ought to suffice, instead of appearing on the ballot. Indeed, it is impossible to accurately translate the name of an office. “Mayor” and “Sheriff,” for example, may be translated into Spanish, but be understood as quite a different type of office, just as those offices vary in power from State to State within the Union. Therefore, those who rely upon such translations are not truly voting to elect a candidate to an office that exists. 

     A larger issue that state challenges to the Voter Rights Act raise is that the federal government constitutionally only has the power to regulate federal elections, not state elections. The burdensome restrictions imposed by federal interpretation of that law are applied to all elections, federal and state, even though the United States has no authority under Article I, Section 4 to regulate state elections. It allows States to regulate federal elections, but reserves the power to alter those regulations. However, States are not prohibited from regulating their own elections. Therefore, federal regulation of state elections violates the 10th Amendment, which reserves powers not delegated to the federal Union and that the Constitution does not prohibit the States from exercising to the States and the people.