High court negates part of voting law

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

A deeply divided Supreme Court threw out the most powerful part of the landmark Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, a decision deplored by the White House but cheered by mostly Southern states now free from nearly 50 years of intense federal oversight of their elections.

Split along ideological and partisan lines, the justices voted 5-4 to strip the government of its most potent tool to stop voting bias — the requirement in the Voting Rights Act that all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, get Washington’s approval before changing the way they conduct elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a majority of conservative, Republican-appointed justices, said the law’s provision that determines which states are covered is unconstitutional because it relies on 40-year-old data and does not account for racial progress and other changes in U.S. society.

The decision effectively puts an end to the advance- approval requirement that has been used to open up polling places to minority voters in the nearly half- century since it first was enacted in 1965, unless Congress can come up with a new formula that Roberts said meets “current conditions” in the United States. That seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black chief executive, issued a statement saying he was “deeply disappointed” with the ruling and calling on Congress to update the law.

But in the South, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said that though the requirement was necessary in the 1960s, that was no longer the case. He said, “We have long lived up to what happened then, and we have made sure it’s not going to happen again.”

The advance approval, or preclearance, requirement shifted the legal burden and required governments that were covered to demonstrate that their proposed election changes would not discriminate.