From today’s NPR News:
With Republicans set to control Congress and the White House starting next year, some voting rights advocates are renewing their focus on protections against racial discrimination in elections that don’t rely on the federal government.
Several states have enacted state-level voting rights acts over the past two decades, and Democratic-led Michigan may be next. This week a state House committee voted to refer a set of state Senate-approved bills to the House floor.
Supporters of this emerging type of law see it as a bulwark at a time when Democratic-led efforts to bolster the federal Voting Rights Act are likely to remain stalled under a GOP trifecta of power in Washington, D.C.
That landmark 1965 law is also under scrutiny in a federal lawsuit out of North Dakota. An appeal by Republican state officials in the case could end up making it harder to enforce the law’s key remaining provisions that the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has not struck down.
“We can expect attacks rather than progress at the federal level, and states must take up the mantle to protect their own voters,” says Adam Lioz, a senior policy counsel for the Legal Defense Fund, who leads the organization’s campaign for more states to pass their own voting rights acts.
So far, it’s a small club of eight mostly blue states with these laws, which offer racial minority groups protections beyond those under the federal Voting Rights Act — California (the first to enact one in 2002), Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.
A controversial ruling by a state judge in New York last month has resurrected the specter of all state voting rights acts potentially being found to violate the U.S. Constitution.
Read the complete story here.