Palmetto State News

Legislation that was the subject of a public hearing in the U.S. Senate last week would give the Department of Justice the power to override the constitutional authority of the states to establish their own election laws and procedures, says the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a self-described conservative legal group promoting integrity in elections.

H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, introduced last week by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont would “put bureaucrats at the DOJ in total control of our elections,” J. Christian Adams, PILF president and general counsel, said in a statement.

Adams said that the abuses of power would be similar to the Justice Department’s targeting of South Carolina’s voter ID law in 2011. 

J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. | Public Interest Legal Foundation

The DOJ charged that that law was discriminatory under Section 5 of the 1965 Voter Rights Act (VRA), because minority voters were less likely to possess a photo ID.

Adams said that in 2012, South Carolina resubmitted its voter ID law to the DOJ for reconsideration and the DOJ rejected it again.

“Eventually the state sought preclearance from the District Court for the District of Columbia,” he said. “The court ruled the law was not inherently discriminatory and it went into effect in 2013.”

Also in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court shot down the preclearance standards in Section 5, employed by the Justice Department in the South Carolina case.

In Shelby County v. Holder, the high court determined that the preclearance standards in the decades-old act were outdated because the standards were used to ensure that states don’t enact poll taxes, literacy tests and other obstacles to voting.

Testifying at last week’s hearing, Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and the former Republican attorney general of Virginia, said “the Supreme Court noted that the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act constituted an ‘uncommon exercise of congressional power’ that was warranted by the ‘exceptional conditions’ existing in 1965, including tests and hurdles to registering to vote and voting in some parts of the country, particularly the South, including my home state of Virginia. The result of those obstacles was substantially lower black voter participation.”

Adams warned that H.R. 4 would “resurrect” Section 5.

“Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice would have to approve nearly every single change to elections including voter ID laws, which they will almost certainly reject. States have the power to run their own elections and enact election integrity laws without interference from the federal government,” he said.