Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund Testifies Before Senate Judiciary Committee and Submits Voting Rights Act Report

14 June 2006

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) executive director Margaret Fung will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Tuesday, June 13th at 9:30 a.m., on the continuing need for voter language assistance under the Voting Rights Act. AALDEF has submitted a comprehensive report to the Committee, in which it finds that voters continue to face pervasive racial discrimination, harassment, and institutional barriers in the electoral process.

Fourteen years after Congress amended the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 to expand access to the ballot for language minorities, AALDEF-a 32-year-old civil rights organization that presented key evidence for its expansion in 1992-presents a sharply focused study of tens of thousands of voters investigating compliance with Congressional reforms in the face of centuries-old policies of anti-Asian exclusion and ongoing discrimination.

AALDEF's report, entitled "Asian Americans and the Voting Rights Act: The Case for Reauthorization," found that disenfranchisement persists despite and even in violation of reforms required under the Act's temporary provisions. Racially hostile poll workers, voter intimidation, and denial of interpreters and translated materials illegally depress turnout in language minority communities-including Asian Americans. The report is a comprehensive analysis of data from multilingual voter surveys and poll monitoring results that date back to 1988, along with hundreds of pages of primary-source documentation and archival materials for the public record.

"Asian American communities have yet to overcome the extensive history of anti-Asian exclusion and barriers to educational parity in the U.S.," said AALDEF executive director Margaret Fung. "We commend Congress for its bipartisan support of the Voting Rights Act, and request the immediate renewal of language assistance and other voter protections."

The Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting nationwide, was passed by Congress in 1965 to eliminate literacy tests, poll taxes, and other barriers to voting. Several key protections will expire in August 2007 unless Congress takes action to renew them.

These temporary provisions for minority voters include Section 203, which provides language assistance for citizens who are limited English proficient, and Section 5, which requires states and counties with a history of discrimination to secure "preclearance" before they can make voting changes. Another set of provisions, Sections 6 through 9, enables the government to send federal election observers to monitor elections.

For a two-page summary of report highlights, including voting incidents, please visit: http://www.aaldef.org/docs/AALDEF_VRAreport_highlights_2006.6.13.pdf .

To download a copy of the report, please visit: http://www.aaldef.org/docs/AALDEF-VRAReauthorization-2006.pdf .

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Source: usnewswire

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