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6 The Impact of Mississippi Litigation on National Voting Rights Law Today the Voting Rights Act is widely viewed as the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted by Congress . This is true not only because it enfranchised millions of black voters throughout the South who previously were denied the right to vote and subsequently was extended to protect non-English-speaking Americans,} but also because it has become the chief vehicle for blocking voting-law changes that adversely affect minorities' voting power and for affirmative lawsuits challenging election systems that dilute minority voting strength. Since 1965, under section 5-which requires federal preclearance of all voting-law changes in covered states-the Justice Department through section 5 objections has blocked the implementation of over 2,000 discriminatory voting-law changes.2 In 1982 Congress extended section 5 for another twenty-five years and also adopted an important amendment to section 2 of the act-a provision that applies nationwide -to eliminate the requirement of proving discriminatory intent in minority vote dilution lawsuits.3 This new section 2 "results" test, which prohibits any voting practice or procedure that results in discrimination , for the first time incorporates in a federal statute the minority vote dilution principle that prohibits any voting law under which minority voters "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.,,4 The Justice Department estimates that since section 2 was amended in 1982, more than 1,300 jurisdictions have changed their methods of electing officials in response to section 2 litigation or the threat of litigation.5 Section 2 has been applied in the South and throughout the nation to strike down discriminatory congressional redistricting and legislative reapportionment plans, atlarge election systems, and voter registration procedures that limit black citizens' opportunities to register to vote. The laws and legal principles that today govern national voting rights policy and litigation were forged in the post-1965 struggle of black voters in the South to overcome the structural barriers to equal Impact of Mississippi Litigation 168 participation in the political process. In particular, the struggle of black voters in Mississippi to overcome the state's political massive resistance strategies had an especially profound influence on voting rights law nationally, the effects of which are still being felt today. The Mississippi cases first established the principle of minority vote dilution in Supreme Court jurisprudence; helped secure extensions of the Voting Rights Act, especially over the opposition of the Nixon administration in 1970; and strengthened section 5's federal preclearance requirement and the Justice Department enforcement role. This chapter explores the impact of these developments on national voting rights policy and examines the criticisms that have been made against this expansion of federal power to protect the right to vote. To understand the contribution of these Mississippi cases to federal voting rights law, we must ask several questions: Precisely what legal principles of general application were established by the cases described in the previous chapters? How did those principles fit into the developing body of modern voting rights law? How should we evaluate the statutory and constitutional safeguards for black political participation today? How valid are current critiques of this body of law? What contemporary implications do these developments have for future challenges to discriminatory electoral structures ? The Principle of Minority Vote Dilution The Supreme Court's refusal in 1967 to hear the black voters' appeal in the Mississippi congressional redistricting case, Connor v. Johnson, described in chapter 3, was symptomatic of the insensitivity of national institutions in the immediate post-1965 period to the legitimate claims of black voters who were being victimized by new forms of voting discrimination. The national movement that produced the Voting Rights Act had identified the denial of the franchise as the central issue of discrimination, and many assumed that once the Voting Rights Act had remedied this problem nothing more needed to be done. As a consequence, the federal courts, with some notable exceptions that included District Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of Alabama,6 initially were resistant to black voters' claims that their voting power was being diluted by discriminatory electoral mechanisms such as atlarge elections and racial gerrymandering. This problem was compounded by the lack of direct Supreme Court precedent holding that such forms of dilution of minority voting strength violated federal constitutional or statutory guarantees. Historically, there were parallels between the efforts to dilute black [3...

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