The leadup to the filing of the action including prior litigation in the 2011 reauthorization of the Voting Rights act. He will also discuss recent change in several states texas, North Carolina, ohio, wisconsin and how and whether preclearance would have affected implementation of these laws. After he speaks, dan will provide more about the process. The context with the case including Voting Rights act preclearance was and wasnt doing, he will also discuss what has happened since 2013 including new tate laws and practices and litigation challenges that under the constitution in section 2 of the Voting Rights act. With that ill hand it over to brendan. Thanks, chad for, for inviting me to participate in the panel. I want to start by saying im here to give my perspective as someone who participated in the actual litigation of the case and to provide that unique perspective for you all to hear. Basically the backdrop of all of this is here in the United States we have dual regulation of elections. We have states with primary responsibility and then we have u. S. Federal constitution which provides certain fundamental guarantees covering, among other things, Voting Rights. With that situation, you have basically stays with primary power except they cant do anything that would violate United States constitution. Then Congress Also has the ability to, quote, enforce the fundamental rights in the United States constitution. Thats where the Voting Rights act comes in. So 1965, congress made the determination that certain additional measures needed to be taken to enforce those fundamental rights. So there were a bunch of different provisions of the vra, one of which was section 5. What section 5 did was kind of unique in comparison to some of the other things that were going on in the Voting Rights act. It set up, for lack of a better term, a prior restraint, basically said states cant do anything, change their election laws in any way until they get approval from the United States attorney general to make that change, which was its hard to overstate how much of a shift that was from kind of the baseline system that we have here. It kind of flips it on its head. That was certain areas of the countries. Those were designated in section 4b of the Voting Rights act. The formula, who has to actually go through that process. Everybody else was just kind of under the baseline system. So thats where section 5 comes in. It was controversial from the out set. Whats interesting, congress put a provision in the act that allowed jurisdictions to bring constitutional challenges to this. Thats something that you see sometimes in election laws where theres some question about the constitutionality of it. This was not an exception to that. The state of South Carolina and a few other states took congress up on that offer and challenged it immediately. Supreme court upheld section 5 and other Voting Rights acts at the time given the circumstances that existed in the early 1960s leading up to this, it was that was a justified use of the enforcement power. It was challenged again on a couple of other occasions, section 5 was and again upheld both times. The thing about section 5 also was it was limited in time period. So you had a situation where initially it was only supposed to be in place for five years and then reevaluated. In fact it was. So 1970, they reauthorized it. 1975 they reauthorized it. 1972 and said to expire 2007. By the time 2005 came around, they were thinking about this again, still in place. Basically unchanged in terms of the coverage formula. So Congress Took up the task again at that point. The relevant committees of both houses of Congress Held hearings on whether this continued to be justified. They took in a lot of evidence. Some of it, in my view, better than other evidence. But they held a lot of hearings. They compiled whats been described throughout the litigation as a 15,000 page record they thought justified this particular action. Nobody could say they didnt work hard at this. So that was basically the reauthorization process. What was kind of important at the time, though, there were serious concerns about Going Forward kind of on the same basis that had formed the justification of the original act. Going forward on the same coverage formula is history enough to justify this type of thing. Or do we need to look at more modern circumstances. Whats really going on on the ground today. Ultimately, not to impugn the academy, they got bad advice about updating the coverage formula. Some folks came in and testified and said, basically, history is enough, plus current circumstances in those jurisdictions. You dont need to look at everybody and say where is this Going Forward. What you should do is look at is it justified in areas of the country where you had this all along. I think ultimately kind of wanted to get to the litigation. There was also testimony about things happening in other areas of the country, things happening in areas of the country covered by the Voting Rights act that did not justify continuing coverage. And so the testimony was kind of a mixed bag on that. From the perspective of a litigator and someone who brought the case that were here to talk about today, in our view, at least, and in the view of covered jurisdictions, there wasnt a lot of evidence of constitutional violations, violations of the United States constitution to justify continued use of this particular provision. So at the time there was that was something debated, a couple of senators thought there was a constitutional problem with it. They ended up voting for it, in any event and kicked the debate to the courts. So thats where the first challenge to that after 2006 was a case called northwest austin. They saw two things. One was to get out of coverage. They asked for whats called a bailout. They asked for the courts to declare they were basically on Good Behavior for ten years. That would put them on a parole system for lack of a better term. They would be out but subject for continued monitoring. They asked for section 5 to be declared unconstitutional. That went up to the sprupreme court in 2008, 2009 time period. In 2008 the Supreme Court ruled on the bailout question, allowed them to bail out and kind of ducked the constitutional question which raised it again for someone to bring a challenge. Thats primarily thats background to tell you how basically we got where i came in. Weve been doing some work for the project on fair representation, which is a group of thugs who are interested in fairness in elections and things of that nature for some time. Some led to litigation, others have not. Weve been doing a bunch of memos for them. By the time the northwest austin decision came out, we thought we had a good shot at getting actual litigation. So thought about discussion with people the possibility of bringing on a jurisdiction and actually challenging the act. We did that. We had written a couple amicus briefs. Nobody paid any attention to those in the Supreme Court. Up until that, thats where it was. We ended up speaking in Shelby County, covered the state of alabama was covered and Shelby County was a county in the state. So by virtue of that, it was a covered jurisdiction. Shelby county itself had been kind of a model of Voting Rights, to be honest with you, for a decent time. There had been cities and towns in the county with their own issues complying with section 5. Shelby county was pretty good. So we signed them on. They decided to file a complaint. So we did that. One of the things we decided to do from the out set was bring two claims, which ended up being important. Section 4b, coverage formula. The second was to bring a challenge to section 5. So because of some things that the court had said in northwest austin about coverage being outdated, we thought breaking it down in that way would crystallize the the issue for the courts when they were addressing that issue. Thats ultimately the way proceeded, rather, and ultimately the way the court ruled. It ruled on section 4b finding coverage formula was outdated and did not respond to current conditions. Did not rule on section 5 issues. So basically the baseline we have today, if congress creates new section formula, section 5 will be back in place. As of right now its not, because theres no valid coverage formula. Let me just start by thanking ifes for bringing us all here today. For inviting me and to thank all of you for being here. It is a great honor to be among such a group of people from around the world who care about democracy as much as we do. The foundation of democracy, any democracy, is the right to vote. This right has long been recognized as fundamental by our Supreme Court, even though our constitution does not explicitly protect Voting Rights as such. Our courts since the 19th century, however, has said that the right to vote is fundamental because it is preservative of all rights. None of our interests, be there in education, employment, health care, whatever it might be are safe unless we are able to vote and participate as equals in democracy. I say this by way of introduction, because although this principle has long been proclaimed in the United States, it has not always been respected. And even today in the United States, there are practices which diminish, dilute or impair Voting Rights by some of our citizens. So let me in my brief remarks start by providing some context both on the United States unusual electoral system and on history before moving to the question of what the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights act were wpt doing at the time the Shelby County case brendan discussed was decided last year. First some context on the u. S. Election disem. Election system. We are very unusual in two major respects here in the United States. Election system. We are very unusual in two major respects here in the United States. We are very unusual in tr respects here in the United States. The first is the profound decentralation decentralization. We have no ability responsibility for managing elections here as is the case in most other countries. Rather elections are run for the most part under the laws of the 50 stays, and they are actually administered at the local level literally by thousands of counties and municipalities, each of which has authority for actually running the daytoday operations of our Voting System at the local level. So we have not just one Voting System, nor even 50 in the United States, but literally thousands. The other distinctive characteristic, some would say pathology of the u. S. Election system, is partisanship. What i mean by that is that in most states the chief election official is someone who is either elected or appointed by their party and runs for office as the candidate for their party or is appointed by someone who is elected as a candidate of their party. That is to say, the chief election official in most states is in that sense a partisan. This cease an inherent conflict of interest between the chief Election Officials responsibility to serve the interest of all voters to create a level Playing Field and that officials interest in serving his or her party and advancing through the ranks of his or her party. It is a problem, by the way, well recognized in other democratic countries which is why they enjoy some degree of insulation from partisan politics. This unfortunately is a lesson we in the United States have yet to learn. Next let me give a little bit of historical contest. For most of this countrys history, racial minorities, most notably africanamericans have been systematically denied the vote in much of this country. That was still the reality 50 years ago in 1965 when the Voting Rights act was adopted. There is no question, as brend ab pointed out, that things have changed considerably in the intervening period. At the time of the Voting Rights act, blacks were systematically kept from voting or even registering throughout southern states, which still for the most part states that were covered at least as of 2013 when the court decided the Shelby County case. So what was the Voting Rights act doing and what wasnt it doing . There has been in recent years a lot of discussion in the United States of vote suppression. Practices that make it more difficult for citizens, especially racial minorities and poor people to vote. Voter id, which youll be hearing about in next hours panel is the most prominent subject of criticism by those who claim voter suppression. But there are other practices such as registration rules, limits on absentee voting, also criticized with instances of suppression. Perception preclearance of the Voting Rights act were an effective tool in the vote suppression practices. The reality, however, was they were quite rarely used to stop those practices. Where the provisions of the Voting Rights act were most often used were with respect to vote dilution at the local level. So for example, new lines were drawn with City Council Elections in the United States, state and local legislative bodies generally have responsibility for not only running elections but for drawing the district lines for which people were elected office. Allegations were made these lines dilute the strength of minority votes. The preclearance provisions brendan discussed were mostly used and, in my view, most effective with respect to these local practices, at large elections, redistricting and so on. Thats what was really lost by the Supreme Courts decision in Shelby County. Im not especially interested in relitigating that decision here. I disagree with the courts decision. I tend to think places that had problems 50 years ago are still the places with the worst problems of race discrimination today. That said, these issues that ive discussed, and i presume well discuss further in this panel, making it more difficult to vote and have ones vote counted, these are national issu issues. At some point i would like to see United StatesCongress Take action to establish a baseline of rules for registration, identification, and early voting so that the many people who move across state lines in the United States know what the rules will be for voting when they move. As it stands now, if you move across state lines, you may face entirely different rules regarding registration, when you can vote, and so on. We have, in my opinion, a lot to learn from the rest of the world in the way we run elections including Voting Rights in the United States. I think adding to that list of federal issues, the way people interact with voting, whats the machine, type of voting that takes place so its consistent. Some machines are more accurate than others. Also a huge issue in the United States is absentee voting. A lot of litigation comes up about absentee voting and thats different for each jurisdiction i think now we can turn to what happened after Shelby County and whats happened since then. Sure. So basically there was a call almost immediately to update the coverage formula, which is what was struck down in the Supreme Court decision in shelby cannot. It took a bit for a draft bill to come out and eventually one did. So i was asked to think a little about what are the options for updating it if there was a desire to do so and kind of whats the situation if they dont do that. I think ill start with the latter question. Section 5, as i mentioned in the beginning, only one roigs of the voting act. Section 2 is nationwide and does address dilutive principles and practices the director was speaking about. In fact, mainly used for those purposes. The trouble the unique feature of section 5 was it stopped things in its tracks before a practice took place whereas section 2 comes after the fact. That was actually what was although as opposed to the ability to practice. There is targeting practices in section 2 of the Voting Rights act. Theres also section 3 of the Voting Rights act called bail in which creates a situation where jurisdiction found it violated u. S. Constitution in terms of Voting Rights, that jurisdiction westbound brought bought type of preclearance section 5 used to have as a default rule in certain areas of the country. That is responsi