On 60th anniversary of Voting Rights Act, McClellan introduces bill to strengthen it

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, landmark legislation that outlawed racist voter disenfranchisement and expanded voting rights to Black Americans whose ability to cast a ballot had been severely limited, especially in Virginia and other states in the South. U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, is marking the occasion by reintroducing a 2007-era proposal to establish a private right of legal action for people who have been subjected to voter deception. 

The measure was first pitched by former President Barack Obama when he was still a U.S. Senator. The Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act would help quash practices intended to trick would-be voters into either not exercising their right to cast a ballot, or voting for a candidate opposite their party affiliation or values. Such deceptive practices include when false information is disseminated about the time, place or eligibility requirements for voting.

McClellan’s legislation would also require the U.S. Department of Justice to report to Congress about the amount and types of deceptive practices it investigates and prosecutes. Updating the previous version Obama carried, McClellan’s bill also aims to address new challenges posed by artificial intelligence-generated disinformation. 

“I will fight to protect everyone’s right to vote from these new threats,” McClellan said in a statement Wednesday.

Obama’s bill, which failed to advance in Congress, followed incidents where deceptive practices were used to recruit field workers and distribute flyers with false endorsements by Black regional figures of Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates. The bill was also later carried by McClellan’s predecessor, the late Don McEachin and others and remains timely, McClellan said, to try again.

More recently, two Virginia men recently pleaded guilty to a series of robo-calls they initiated in 2020 to dissuade Black voters in Detroit, Michigan during that year’s elections. And last year, New Jersey’s state legislature explored allowing targeted candidates or registered voters to seek court orders to stop distribution of AI-generated deepfake content within 90 days of an election.  

The matter is personal to McClellan, whose great-grandfather had to take a literacy test and find three white men who would vouch for him to be able to vote, at a time when America was piecing itself back together after the Civil War. Black people were free, but still disenfranchised under a system of government-sanctioned racial discrimination. The cycle continued as McClellan’s grandfather and father had to pay poll taxes to be able to vote. And of course, her late mother couldn’t vote at all until 1965. Though the suffrage movement granted white women the ability to vote in 1920, women of color had to wait to cast their ballots until the federal Voting Rights Act was signed into law 45 years later.

In trying to strengthen that law, McClellan said in a call with The Mercury that it’s even more important to do so now as it is “under the biggest threat in its history.” 

Seats at the table and access to the ballot box see fresh debates

McClellan’s new bill comes as heated debates about voter protections boil across the country. 

Amid a redistricting case stemming from Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ordered that parties address whether the state’s creation of a second majority-Black congressional district violated other amendments in the U.S. Constitution that provides for congressional representation and due process and forbids denial of votes based on race. 

The move, which experts say could reverberate nationally, may signal that the nation’s highest court is looking to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That section forbids election laws that discriminate based on race, color or membership in language minority groups. A third of Louisiana’s population is Black, something its state legislature accounted for when passing a law to allow a second minority-majority district. That move stemmed from a previous lawsuit in 2022 that found the state’s previous congressional maps had violated the Voting Rights Act. 

Republican stronghold Texas is pursuing a mid-cycle redistricting to dilute Democratic-held congressional seats and benefit the Republican party ahead of next year’s congressional elections — a move supported by President Donald Trump. 

“We’re entitled to five more seats,” Trump told CNBC this week. 

Democratic-led states have countered with their own redistricting considerations. 

The process is typically handled every decade as a new U.S. Census data is collected and districts are meant to be apportioned for fair representation. However, the way each state handles the redrawing of their maps can lead to gerrymandering, or unfair maps created by lawmakers themselves. Virginia passed a constitutional amendment to take the process out of lawmakers’ hands in 2020, and some Democrats are now open to changing things.

“You have one party that has the capacity to change things at the midterms for their benefit,” political analyst Bob Holsworth recently told Radio IQ. “And you have another party that is struggling to see if they can engage in this tit-for-tat.”

Partisanship aside, McClellan is keenly aware of how historic voter suppression attempts typically target people of color or lower-income families. She sees the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, pending in the U.S. Senate, as an emerging challenge.

The measure’s backers say it will further reduce risk of voter fraud or non-citizens voting in elections by requiring voters to show additional documentation to be able to cast a ballot. Accepted documents would be birth certificates or passports — which experts and the bill’s critics say most people don’t have readily available and would need to make appointments and pay fees to access. 

McClellan calls it a “modern-day poll tax.” 

The League of Women Voters advocacy group also cautions that married women who have changed their names to that of their spouse could be disenfranchised by it, as well. Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship for people born on U.S. soil whose parents are immigrants have also been undergoing legal challenges. 

“Voting rights in and of themselves are under the worst attack that we have seen since the attacks post-Reconstruction,” McClellan said. “That’s part of a larger pattern of backlash to progress.”