Localism and Voting Rights

Abstract

The Voting Rights Act's (VRA) preclearance regime requires covered jurisdictions to submit all law changes affecting elections to United States Attorney General for approval before they can be enforced. This regime has been persistently characterized as a uniquely heavy-handed federal intervention into state and local lawmaking. In a constitutional challenge to preclearance regime now before Supreme Court, petitioners have called it the most federally invasive law in existence. This article counters this conventional view by showing that institutionalization of antidiscrimination policy by VRA is consistent with decentralization and localism. In so doing, this article pursues several goals. First, it challenges standard opposition of localism and rights. By focusing on implementation and institutionalization of voting rights, it emerges that more decentralized approach of VRA has been very successful. The article draws a contrast in this regard with much more equivocal success of more formal, precise, categorical approach of one-person/one-vote rule. Finally, understanding of VRA's institutional architecture advanced in this article is then applied to other issues arising from 2006 Reauthorization of VRA. The paper argues, for example, that it is consistent with methods and goals of VRA that Ashcroft fix in new Section 5 be read as permitting trade-offs of majority minority districts for coalition districts, but only if consent of local minority representatives is obtained. The paper addresses several other issues based on this approach.