Has the Voting Rights Act Outlived Its Usefulness? In a Word, “No”

• Date: 01 November 2009
• Author: DAVID LUBLIN,BERNARD GROFMAN,THOMAS L. BRUNELL,LISA HANDLEY
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3162/036298009789869673
• Published date: 01 November 2009

525Voting Rights Act

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXIV, 4, November 2009 525

DAVID LUBLIN

American University

THOMAS L. BRUNELL

University of Texas, Dallas

BERNARD GROFMAN

University of California, Irvine

LISA HANDLEY

Frontier International Electoral Consulting

Has the Voting Rights Act

Outlived Its Usefulness?

In a Word, “No”

Race-conscious redistricting remains crucial to the election of an overwhelming

number of African American and Latino officials. We present descriptive evidence,

easily interpretable by nonspecialists, from recent elections at the state and federal

levels to support our claims. The Voting Rights Act remains a valuable tool to protect

the ability of minorities to elect their preferred candidates.

The intentional creation and protection of electoral districts

designed to allow minority groups, primarily African Americans and

Latinos, to elect their preferred candidates to public office remain the

most controversial aspects of the reauthorized Voting Rights Act.

Political scientists have debated heatedly the necessity of race-

conscious redistricting to elect minority officials on jurisprudential,

philosophical, and empirical grounds. This article focuses on the

empirical question of the relationship between the racial composition

of state legislative and congressional districts and the election of African

American and Latino candidates.

Political scientists have often addressed the practical question of

whether or not race-conscious districts continue to play a valuable

role in ensuring the election of minority legislators. One group contends

that districts wherein minorities constitute a majority of the population,

whatever these districts’ previous value in adding diversity to the

legislature, are, as a matter of empirical fact, no longer crucial to

minority electoral success (Cameron, Epstein, and O’Halloran 1996;

526 David Lublin et al.

Swain 1995; Thernstrom 1987; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1999).1

Another set of scholars argues that majority-minority districts play a

key role in the election of African American and Latino legislators

(Brunell and Grofman 2008; Davidson and Grofman 1994; Grofman

and Handley 1989, 1991; Handley, Grofman, and Arden 1998; Lublin

1997) but acknowledge that minority candidates can win in some

majority-white districts under special circumstances (Grofman,

Handley, and Lublin 2001).

Judicial decisions about when redistricting plans are dilutive of

minority voting strength (or are retrogressive in nature) have been

greatly influenced by social-science research presented at trial, with

jurisdiction-specific analysis of whether or not minority-preferred

candidates can win election in the specific districts central to most

redistricting challenges. Trial court decisions have also naturally been

guided by Supreme Court decisions regarding the constitutionality of

taking race into account when drawing district boundaries and on the

appropriate constitutional and statutory standards to use when race is

implicated. These decisions have often been influenced by more-general

studies on the necessity of race-conscious redistricting to promote the

election of minority-preferred candidates.

Political scientists can make a valuable contribution to the current

legal and scholarly debates over race-conscious redistricting by

providing information that will permit the judiciary to make an

empirically informed decision about the current importance of race-

conscious redistricting to the continued election of minority candidates.

This article presents recent, critical data that permit fact-based judg-

ments about the effect of race-conscious redistricting at the state and

congressional levels and the continuing need for the creation and legal

protection of majority-minority districts or other districts in which

minorities possess a realistic opportunity to elect their candidates of

choice. We follow the efforts of previous scholars to present information

and analyses useful to political scientists but also easy to interpret by

nonspecialists (see, for examples, Grofman and Handley 1989 and

Handley, Grofman, and Arden 1998).

Although there is evidence to suggest that minority candidates

are beginning to win elections in some non-minority districts, the over-

whelming number of minority legislators continue to represent

majority-minority districts. Furthermore, a closer examination of the

evidence offered by some researchers to suggest that minority candi-

dates are much more successful in non-minority districts than used to

be the case reveals that many of these minority legislators won in

districts where black and Latino constituents together formed a majority.