House Judiciary subcommittee hears testimony to end voter suppression

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Washington, DC – Voting rights experts testified today before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in a hearing to examine voter suppression in America. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, which is tasked with enforcing civil rights and voting rights law, has come under fire since the start of the Bush administration for politicization, resulting in departures of longtime career staff and abuse of its enforcement authority to block access to the polls. Laughlin McDonald, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, submitted written testimony illuminating disenfranchisement among American Indian voters.

“The United States has a long history of denying and suppressing the voting rights of American Indians,” said McDonald. “Modern-day efforts to deny and suppress the Indian vote have run the gamut from the maintenance and manipulation of discriminatory election procedures to the refusal of election officials to provide access to registration and voting, to unfounded allegations of voter fraud, to the adoption of discriminatory ID requirements for voting. Even these examples are not exhaustive.”

The majority leader from the Minnesota House of Representative; experts from the Campaign Legal Center and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and a Justice Department official testified about tactics resulting in voter suppression, which include state requirements to show photo identification at the polls, decreased efforts among social service agencies to register voters and overly strict rules to keep voters off the rolls because of administrative errors.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Justice Department has conflated the historically separate work of the Civil Rights Division, which stops disfranchisement, with the work of the Criminal Division, which combats voter fraud. As a result, efforts to ensure universal access to voting have essentially been subsumed by efforts to punish voters who break the law.

“For nearly a decade, the Justice Department has made a mockery of voting rights enforcement,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The time for Congress to conduct oversight of the Civil Rights Division has come, and the time for the Civil Rights Division to start enforcing voting rights is long past overdue.”