RACE AND VOTING

Controversies over race and voting stem from the fact that citizens belong to racial and ethnic groups with different and often conflicting interests, and as group members they tend to vote for candidates representing those interests. What should be done when their group's preferred candidates are consistently prevented from winning election?

The question became urgent after passage of the voting rights act of 1965. In the South, most newly enfranchised blacks were unable to elect black candidates. Racially polarized voting was the main culprit: In electoral venues where whites outnumbered blacks—and in the 1960s this was almost always the case—white votes overwhelmed black ones.

The paucity of majority-black venues resulted primarily from racial gerrymandering; white legislators refused to draw majority-black districts in single-member-district systems or adopted majority-white multimember-district ("at-large") systems. Suits by black and other minority voters—particularly Hispanics—attacked racial gerrymandering as illegal efforts to dilute minority voting strength. On this theory, the fourteenth amendment guarantees racial minorities the opportunity to participate equally in the political process by electing candidates of their choice, and the guarantee is abridged by electoral districting that denies minorities this opportunity. The Supreme Court adopted the theory in White v. Regester (1973), and Congress in 1982 then added vote-dilution protection to groups covered by the Voting Rights Act. Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) simplified the criteria for proving dilution, and the U.S. Department of Justice, charged with administering the Voting Rights Act, required states redistricting after the 1990 Census to draw majority-minority districts whenever feasible. Consequently, from the middle 1970s to the early 1990s the number of black and Hispanic officials in the South and Southwest, respectively, increased sharply.

This trend was reversed in the mid-1990s. In shaw v. reno (1993), white plaintiffs in North Carolina, a state that is 22 percent black, challenged aspects of the 1990s reapportionment, which had resulted in the election of the first two African American members of Congress from that state since reconstruction. The plaintiffs claimed that the shape of one of the safe black districts was "so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional districting principles and without sufficiently compelling justification." The Court majority agreed that such a claim was justiciable. In miller v. johnson (1995) the Court emphasized that the harm to voters was not determined by the shape of the district, but by whether the district had been created predominantly for racial purposes. This new cause of action is said to derive from a theory of "expressive harms," as distinct from either vote denial or vote dilution.

Shaw caused various safe black and Hispanic congressional districts to be replaced with majority-white ones. Vote-dilution challenges by minority plaintiffs diminished, and suits were filed challenging safe minority districts below the congressional level.

Critics of vote-dilution litigation welcomed these developments. Among their reasons, all arguable, are that racial gerrymanders as remedies for vote dilution violate the principle of "the colorblind Constitution"; that creating safe minority districts both cuts the Democratic margins among elected officials and diminishes the substantive representation of minority voters; and that the probable decline in the number of minority elected officials resulting from Shaw encourages consideration of proportional representation schemes that are allegedly superior to winner-take-all, single-member-district plans.

In response, those who favor the theory of minority vote dilution argue that, whatever the trade-offs between electing minority officeholders and furthering the substantive representation of minorities, minority voters lose an important kind of access to the polity when white bloc voting constrains (and in some locales prohibits altogether) minority officeholding. This argument, in turn, raises the issue of how intense racially polarized voting is today, particularly in the South and Southwest. Systematic research suggests that it is still quite intense there, although the degree of intensity is disputed among political scientists.

In the nation's polity as on the Court, three views on race and voting presently vie for supremacy: race neutrality in districting, which rejects the theory of minority vote dilution altogether; racial pluralism, which advocates protecting the right of minority groups to elect their candidates of preference using race-based districting; and proportional representation, through the replacement of district systems with such plans as limited or cumulative voting. None of these views has yet gained ascendancy.

Chandler Davidson
(2000)

Bibliography

Davidson, Chandler and Grofman, Bernard, eds. 1994 Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act 1965–1990. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Guinier, Lani 1994 The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press.

Issacharoff, Samuel;K arlan, Pamela S.; and Pildes, Richard H. 1998 The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process. Westbury, N.Y.: Foundation Press.

Kousser, J. Morgan 1999 Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Lublin, David 1997 The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Swain, Carol M. 1993 Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Thernstrom, Abigail 1987 Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univesity Press.