Latinos Lose In Arizona’s AG Suit Against Voting Rights Act

On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into legislation.The V.R.A. closely followed the wording of the 15th Amendment;  it applied a nationwide prohibition against denying or abridging the rights of voters via literacy test or poll tax or last minute “provisions”. The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government wide powers to ensure no citizens were being barred from voting.  It was a huge deal, especially when it came to addressing the disenfranchisement of voters and state efforts to bar minorities from voting and expressing their democratic will.

If you are a minority in this country and you are unfamiliar with the history of this legislation, then chances are that you are equally unaware that the Wall Street Journal reported on August 26th that the attorney general of Arizona, Tom Horne, was suing the federal government to get it to repeal the Voting Rights Acts. According to the Department of Justice, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act gave the federal government, “jurisdictions” to combat “special (state-level) provisions [which] could affect voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect.” Also, Section 5 gave the federal government the power to ascribe a “federal examiner” to “review the qualifications of persons who wanted to register to vote…and monitor activities within the county’s polling place.”

In an attempt to placate the wealthy, conservative residents of Arizona, Tom Horne is taking advantage of Section 5’s broad brushstroke in delineating the law and having it stick at the state level. However, the Voting Rights Act was a federal response to the state government willfully disregarding it’s responsibility to ensure equality in voting access to all citizens, regardless of race. In other words, the law is broad on purpose; it was designed to dissuade state attacks against it’s legality. The genius of this legislation is that it literally turned the tables on the bigots and purveyors of prejudice, “Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.

Section 5 also gave the federal government the power to create a federal examiner  to monitor and survey election  protocols; if there was something amiss electorally, chances are this federal examiner would sniff it out and tattle on the state to the federal government. Arizona was a jurisdiction in which severe racism and racial inequality existed, so it received its very own “narc” because it had proven unruly. Now, Tom Honer says that his beef is primarily with Arizona still having a federal examiner imposed on it’s sovereignty courtesy of Section 5 of the bill, but I say let sleeping dogs lie. If the federal government has constructed legislation in broad strokes it is so that the state government has the legal obligation of protecting voter rights and providing access to polls.

I fear this may be a slick ploy to win some new friends in Arizona’s conservative, religious, and heavily-armed Anglo class of privilege.

If this were Arizona’s first racist strike, then I might consent that what was needed was less government oversight. But, Arizona has repeatedly shown the world that its constituents and political figures need to be surveyed. Remember, this is the state of Arizona, where a person’s legal status (HB 1070) is a local police matter. This is the same Arizona that passed a bill (HB 2281) that made it illegal to have an ethnic studies program, regardless of grade level, student interest, or parental involvement. But, more than half of Arizona’s schools are Latino, and I think many of those students should have access to the history of all the people in the great state of Arizona. However, in lieu of Arizona’s past behaviors and Horne’s move to sue the federal government, it seems that Arizona’s white power elite need verification from Horne that SandLand will forever remain an Anglo bastion.

As a community and as a people, we can not afford to retreat in apathy from what is transpiring in Arizona; we must not allow an informal retreat of our hard-earned freedoms.