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Selma plus 40

The voting rights that Americans now take for granted were still in doubt, denied to many, as recently as 40 years ago. On March 7, 1965, a date remembered as "Bloody Sunday," the savagery of a state police assault on peaceful marchers at Selma, Ala., led to passage of the Voting Rights Act five months later. At Selma and throughout much of the South, as President Johnson forcefully told a joint session of Congress, the only way to become a voter was "to show a white skin."

That much is history. Today, all Americans who are eligible are welcome at the registration office and at the polls regardless of their race or where they live. John Lewis, whose skull was fractured on Bloody Sunday, returned to Selma this week as one of 43 black members of Congress. As Lewis has said, the Selma to Montgomery march "transformed American politics."

In a bloodless revolution that came to fruition almost simultaneously, the Supreme Court put an end to the malapportionment of state legislatures typified by such rural ruling blocs as Florida's infamous "Pork Chop Gang." Voting districts today are as equal in population as computers can make them.

But it is one thing to have the vote and another to make it matter. An evil aftermath to Selma is the sophisticated misuse of census and political data to gerrymander districts that leave little or nothing to the voter's choice. These are ghettoes for black and white voters alike, and it adds insult to this injury that the Voting Rights Act has often been misused to justify them.

Gerrymandering accomplishes only two things well: to strengthen the party in power and to protect incumbents. There is no suspense left in elections for most state legislatures or for the U.S. House of Representatives. This is one reason why American voter participation is so poor, rarely reaching 60 percent of those eligible even in presidential years. There are reforms that could and should be enacted: Voting districts drawn by independent commissions rather than by state legislatures. Standards to prohibit political featherbedding. Various forms of proportional representation. Instant runoffs. Extended early voting periods. Automatic restoration of voting rights for offenders who complete their sentences.

Forty years after Selma, the voting rights revolution remains incomplete. Must Americans wait another 40 years for their votes to actually count?

[Last modified March 8, 2005, 16:52:55]