MIAMI - After the Supreme Court decision that struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, a growing number of Republican-led states are moving aggressively to tighten voting rules. Lawsuits by President Barack Obama’s administration and voting-rights activists say those efforts disproportionately affect members of minority groups.
At least five Southern states, no longer required to ask for permission before changing election procedures, are adopting strict voter-identification laws or toughening existing requirements.
Texas officials are battling the U.S. Justice Department to put in place a voter-ID law that a federal court has ruled was discriminatory. In North Carolina, the GOP-controlled Legislature scaled back early voting and ended a preregistration program for high school students nearing voting age.
Nowhere is the debate more heated than in Florida, where the chaotic recount in the disputed 2000 presidential race took place.
Florida election officials plan to resume an effort to remove noncitizens from the state’s voting rolls. A purge last year ended in embarrassment after hundreds of American citizens, most of whom were black or Hispanic, were asked to prove their citizenship or risk losing the right to vote.
Republican leaders across the South say the new measures are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though such crimes are rare. Democrats and civil-rights groups say the changes are political attacks aimed at minority groups and students - voting groups that tend to lean toward Democrats - in states with legacies of poll taxes and literacy tests.
For five decades, states and localities with a history of discrimination had to submit all election laws, including new congressional district maps, precinct locations andvoting hours, to federal lawyers for approval. That practice ended in June when the Supreme Court struck down the provision in the Voting Rights Act.
Voting-rights groups said recent actions by Southern states highlight the need for Congress to retool the rejected sections of the landmark 1965 law that were credited with ensuring ballot access to millions of blacks, American Indians and other minority groups.
The administration is using the remaining parts of the law to file court cases.
When Attorney General Eric Holder announced a suit last month to place Texas under federal supervision again, he said the Justice Department would not allow the high court’s decision “to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.”
Gov. Rick Scott, R-Fla., has defended his state’s planned voter purge, saying it has an obligation to maintain the integrity of the vote.
“I care about your sacred right to vote,” he said. “Your sacred right to vote should not be diluted by somebody who does not have the right to vote.”
The state is running into resistance from county election supervisors, who are the only ones with the power to remove voters from the rolls.The local officials said they are wary of another effort targeting noncitizens after last year’s botched campaign.
“They did a sloppy, slapdash effort, and the voters were the victims,” said Lori Edwards, the supervisor of elections in Polk County and president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.
In 2012, the state’s initial list of 180,000 potential noncitizens, culled from a comparison of drivers’ licenses and voter registration data, was pared back to 2,600 names. But when election supervisors contacted those on the list, they found many were citizens.
One was Murat Limage, 45,a Haitian-American taxi driver from Tampa. He had come from Haiti to join his family in Florida in 1999 and he became a naturalized citizen in 2010. When he received a letter from the county elections department, he said he was worried authorities wanted to revoke his citizenship.
After producing his passport for a county official, he said he was told no further action was necessary. Limage said the experience stirred the same anger he felt as a young man when he watched footage of the Haitian military gun down citizens waiting to vote in that country’s presidential election.
“I came here for my freedom, and they tried to take it away from me,” he said. “You don’t have to use guns or killing. But it’s the same thing.”
The state was ordered to halt its effort after Limage and several voting-rights groups sued, alleging Florida had violated the Voting Rights Act.
State officials apologized and said the mistakes arose from using a database of driver licenses to check names. This year, the state will use a more reliable federal immigration database it sued to gain access to.
Secretary of State Ken Detzner will travel throughout Florida next month to hear the concerns of county election supervisors.
Detzner dismissed the arguments of critics, including election supervisors, who say the state has yet to provide any evidence of widespread voter fraud.
“It’s not a matter of scope. It’s a matter of following the law,” Detzner said.
Information for this article was contributed by Gary Fineout of The Associated Press
Front Section, Pages 6 on 09/29/2013