Voting Rights Act expires in 2007! [View All]

While collecting sigs today a black women told me about this......I didn't believe her! Before everyone states the 15 amendment there was a reason for the act in the first place (after Florida 2000) I have no reason to believe that the need for the renewal does not still exist. Nothing this administration does including the Tom Delay Congress would surprise me.

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The confusion arises from the apparent assumption that it's the Voting Rights Act alone which guarantees suffrage to minorities. In reality, all the Act does is keep in place a set of so-called "extraordinary remedies" meant to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment at state and local levels, where, in defiance of federal law, obstacles to the voting rights of black people were still in place in some parts of the country as of the early 1960s. These remedies, designed specifically to address problems that existed at the time, were never meant to be permanent, which is why the Voting Rights Act comes up for renewal every 25 years.

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http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa120298.htm