    [House Hearing, 116 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                      CONTINUING CHALLENGES TO THE VOTING
                  RIGHTS ACT SINCE ``SHELBY COUNTY V. HOLDER''

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                              SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE
                     CONSTITUTION, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND CIVIL
                                   LIBERTIES

                                     of the

                           COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                         ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                 JUNE 25, 2019

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 116-31

                                   __________

             Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary

    [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

            Available http://judiciary.house.gov or www.govinfo.gov

                                   __________

                        U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
    39-717                      WASHINGTON : 2020

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                           COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                       JERROLD NADLER, New York, Chairman
    ZOE LOFGREN, California              DOUG COLLINS, Georgia,
    SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas              Ranking Member
    STEVE COHEN, Tennessee               F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
    HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr.,          Wisconsin
        Georgia                          STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
    THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida          LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
    KAREN BASS, California               JIM JORDAN, Ohio
    CEDRIC L. RICHMOND, Louisiana        KEN BUCK, Colorado
    HAKEEM S. JEFFRIES, New York         JOHN RATCLIFFE, Texas
    DAVID N. CICILLINE, Rhode Island     MARTHA ROBY, Alabama
    ERIC SWALWELL, California            MATT GAETZ, Florida
    TED LIEU, California                 MIKE JOHNSON, Louisiana
    JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland               ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
    PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington          TOM McCLINTOCK, California
    VAL BUTLER DEMINGS, Florida          DEBBIE LESKO, Arizona
    J. LUIS CORREA, California           GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
    MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania,      BEN CLINE, Virginia
      Vice-Chair                         KELLY ARMSTRONG, North Dakota
    SYLVIA R. GARCIA, Texas              W. GREGORY STEUBE, Florida
    JOE NEGUSE, Colorado
    LUCY McBATH, Georgia
    GREG STANTON, Arizona
    MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania
    DEBBIE MUCARSEL-POWELL, Florida
    VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas

            Perry Apelbaum, Majority Staff Director & Chief Counsel
                    Brendan Belair, Minority Staff Director

                                     ------

                SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION, CIVIL RIGHTS,
                              AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

                         STEVE COHEN, Tennessee, Chair
    JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland               MIKE JOHNSON, Louisiana,
    ERIC SWALWELL, California              Ranking Member
    MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania       LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
    MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania         JIM JORDAN, Ohio
    SYLVIA R. GARCIA, Texas              GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
    VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas              BEN CLINE, Virginia
    SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas            KELLY ARMSTRONG, North Dakota

                           James Park, Chief Counsel
                         Paul Taylor, Minority Counsel

                               C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------

                                 JUNE 25, 2019

                               OPENING STATEMENTS

                                                                       Page
    The Honorable Steve Cohen, Chairman, Subcommittee on the
      Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties................    41
    The Honorable Mike Johnson, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on the
      Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties................    43
    The Honorable Jerrold Nadler, Chairman, Committee on the
      Judiciary......................................................    45
    The Honorable Doug Collins, Ranking Member, Committee on the
      Judiciary......................................................    47

                                    WITNESS

    Kristen Clarke, President & Executive Director, National Lawyers'
      Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
        Oral Testimony...............................................     2
        Prepared Testimony...........................................     4
    The Honorable Stacey Abrams, Chair, Fair Fight Action
        Oral Testimony...............................................    49
        Prepared Testimony...........................................    52
    The Honorable Kyle Hawkins, Solicitor General of Texas, Office of
      the Texas Attorney General
        Oral Testimony...............................................    57
        Prepared Testimony...........................................    59
    Leah C. Aden, Deputy Director of Litigation, NAACP Legal Defense
      & Educational Fund, Inc.
        Oral Testimony...............................................    83
        Prepared Testimony...........................................    86

              LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING

    Item for the record submitted by the Honorable Sylvia Garcia,
      Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil
      Liberties......................................................   113
    Item for the record submitted by the Honorable Veronica Escobar,
      Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil
      Liberties......................................................   161
    Statement for the record submitted by the Honorable Sheila
      Jackson Lee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights,
      and Civil Liberties............................................   166
    Item for the record submitted by the Honorable Doug Collins,
      Ranking Member, Committee on the Judiciary.....................   179

                                    APPENDIX

    Item for the record submitted by The Honorable Steve Cohen,
      Chairman, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and
      Civil Liberties................................................   192

     CONTINUING CHALLENGES TO THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT SINCE SHELBY COUNTY V.
                                     HOLDER

                                  ----------

                             TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2019

                            House of Representatives

                Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights,
                              and Civil Liberties

                           Committee on the Judiciary

                                Washington, DC.

        The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:44 p.m., in
    Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Steve Cohen
    [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
        Present: Representatives Cohen, Nadler, Raskin, Dean,
    Garcia, Escobar, Jackson, Johnson, Collins, Gohmert, Jordan,
    Reschenthaler, Cline, and Armstrong
        Staff Present: David Greengrass, Senior Counsel; John Doty,
    Senior Advisor; Lisette Morton, Director, Policy Planning and
    Member Services; Madeline Strasser, Chief Clerk; Moh Sharma,
    Member Services and Outreach Advisor; Susan Jensen,
    Parliamentarian/Senior Counsel; Julian Gerson, Staff Assistant;
    Keenan Keller, Senior Counsel; Will Emmons, Professional Staff
    Member; Paul Taylor, Minority Counsel; and Andrea Woodard,
    Minority Professional Staff Member.
        Mr. Cohen. The Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on
    the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties will come
    to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare
    a recess of the subcommittee at any time. We welcome everyone's
    attendance here in the hearing on Continuing Challenges to the
    Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. We know this is
    the 6th anniversary of Shelby County v. Holder.
        Normally, what we would do is I would give an opening
    statement of 5 minutes, and then the ranking member would give
    one of 5 minutes, but Ms. Clarke, one of our witnesses, has a
    3:40 train, which would have been easy to accomplish if it
    weren't for the House of Representatives' schedule. And with
    the permission of the ranking member, we are going to go
    straight to her statement and then go back into the traditional
    my talk, he talk, somebody else talk, the panel.
        So Ms. Clarke, thank you so much for being here. Ms. Clarke
    is the President and Executive Director of the National Lawyers
    Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the Nation's
    leading civil rights organizations. She previously worked for
    several years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
    where she helped lead the organization's work in the areas of
    voting rights and election law across the country and worked on
    cases defending the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.
        Prior to joining the Legal Defense Fund, she worked in the
    Civil Rights Division at the cannot of justice, serving as a
    prosecutor in the criminal section of the Division of Voting
    Rights and redistricting cases through the division's voting
    section. She received her J.D. from Columbia University and her
    Bachelor's degree from another ivy school called Harvard.
        I normally give you the warning. I give you the warning.
    You start, you have got a green light, it goes off in 4
    minutes, a yellow light, and that means you have got--yellow
    light is off, you have to got to go to the train. You are
    recognized for 5 minutes.

    STATEMENTS OF KRISTEN CLARKE, PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
     NATIONAL LAWYERS' COMMITTEE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS UNDER LAW; HON.
    STACEY ABRAMS, FOUNDER AND CHAIR, FAIR FIGHT ACTION; HON. KYLE
       HAWKINS, SOLICITOR GENERAL OF TEXAS, OFFICE OF THE TEXAS
      ATTORNEY GENERAL; LEAH ADEN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF LITIGATION,
              NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE & EDUCATIONAL FUND, INC.

                      STATEMENT OF KRISTEN CLARKE

        Ms. Clarke. Thank you, Chairman Cohen, Ranking Member
    Johnson, and members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution,
    Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. My name is Kristen Clarke,
    and I serve as the President and Executive Director of the
    Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and I thank you
    for the opportunity to testify today on challenges to voting
    rights.
        My testimony today is shaped by my experience as an
    attorney who started off her career enforcing Section 5 of the
    Voting Rights Act at the Justice Department, as someone who
    litigated the Shelby County versus Holder case, and as someone
    who has worked to protect voting rights their entire career.
        The Voting Rights Act of 1965 transformed American
    democracy, and the Supreme Court's evisceration of the Section
    5 preclearance provision of the Act, coupled with a Justice
    Department that has abdicated its responsibility for enforcing
    remaining provisions of the Act, have placed the voting rights
    of our Nation's most vulnerable communities in peril. These
    dynamics have created a perfect storm, resulting in the
    resurgence of voting discrimination and voter suppression at
    levels not seen since the days of Jim Crow. It is worth
    underscoring that the current administration has not filed a
    single case under the Voting Rights Act. The Justice
    Department's silence is deafening.
        The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has been
    at the forefront of the battle for equal voting rights since it
    was created in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy
    to enlist the private bar's leadership and resources in
    combating voting discrimination and more. Today, our vast
    docket of voting rights litigation is among the most
    comprehensive and far-reaching, both geographically and in
    terms of issues raised, as any in the Nation.
        And by way of our election protection program, the Nation's
    largest nonpartisan voter protection effort, anchored by the
    866 Our Vote hotline, we have vetted complaints from tens of
    thousand of voters since Shelby, many revealing systemic voting
    discrimination. In short, this is how Shelby has impacted our
    democracy.
        First, we have seen the resurgence of discriminatory voting
    practices, some motivated by intentional discrimination. And
    this discrimination has been most intense in the very
    jurisdictions that were once covered by Section 5. They range
    from the consolidation of polling sites to make it less
    convenient for minority voters to vote, to the curtailing of
    early voting hours, the purging of minority voters from the
    rolls under the pretext of list maintenance, strict photo ID
    requirements, abuse of signature match verification
    requirements to reject absentee ballots, the threat of criminal
    prosecution, and more.
        Second, we have seen increased levels of recalcitrance and
    hostility among elected officials who institute and reinstitute
    discriminatory voting changes with impunity. Well-known
    examples come out of North Carolina, where the legislature
    adopted an omnibus bill that the Fourth Circuit found was
    crafted with surgical precision. My written testimony includes
    an appendix that outlines several cases since the Shelby
    decision that evidence this hostility.
        Third, the loss of public notice regarding changes in
    voting practices that could have a discriminatory effect is
    significant. Most suppressive actions occur in small towns
    sprinkled across the country, where constant oversight is
    difficult, if not impossible.
        Fourth, the public no longer has the ability to participate
    in the process of reviewing practices before they take effect.
    And between 2000 and 2010, DOJ received between 4,500 and 5,500
    submissions, capturing between 14,000 and 20,000 voting changes
    per year. Without Section 5, communities are in the dark, and
    unable to share critical information that can help to
    illuminate the discrimination that sometimes underlies voting
    changes.
        Fifth, the preclearance process had an identifiable
    deterrent effect that is now lost.
        Sixth, the status quo is not sustainable. Civil rights
    organizations are stepping up to fill the void created by the
    Shelby decision at insurmountable expense.
        And finally, this will be the first redistricting cycle in
    decades if Congress fails to restore the Voting Rights Act. A
    little over 12 years ago, both Chambers of Congress
    reauthorized the Act with tremendous bipartisan support. Many
    members of the House present for that vote are still here
    today. Bipartisan support for the Act has been consistent
    across the decades and should remain so today. The Supreme
    Court has put the ball in Congress' court, and this body must
    take action now to help our country safeguard the right to vote
    for all. Thank you.
        [The statement of Ms. Clarke follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Mr. Cohen. You are welcome, Ms. Clarke, and thank you for
    your testimony. Because you are leaving, I want to first thank
    you, and I want you to know we are going to have the hardest
    questions for you. You still have to answer questions that we
    give you in writing, and you are going to get the hardest ones.
        Ms. Clarke. I thank you, Chairman.
        Mr. Cohen. I am sure you will handle them deftly.
        Ms. Clarke. Absolutely. Thank you, Chairman.
        Mr. Cohen. You are welcome. Thank you so much.
        I will now recognize myself for an opening statement. The
    right to vote is the most fundamental right of citizenship in
    our democracy. It is the base where it all starts, and that is
    where it happens. Yet, for most of our Nation's history, too
    many of our citizens have been denied the right to vote. For
    over a century, women were denied the right to vote, and for a
    century and a half, African Americans were the most brutally
    attacked, denying their rights to vote, especially in the deep
    south.
        On August 6 of 1965, our Nation took a momentous step
    towards correcting that injustice when President Lyndon Johnson
    signed into law the Voting Rights Act. That was the results of
    years of efforts by the civil rights monument led by heroes
    like our colleague, Representative John Lewis, and Dr. Martin
    Luther King and others, to get Congress to act on protecting
    voting rights for African Americans.
        I fear, however, the developments of the last several years
    have undermined the Act's basic protections. That is because 6
    years ago today in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court
    effectively suspended the Act's Section 5 preclearance
    requirement by striking down the coverage formula in Section 4
    that determined which jurisdictions would be subject to
    preclearance.
        In essence, they said not necessarily that those
    jurisdictions that had been under preclearance had cleaned up
    their act, but there were other jurisdictions that were maybe
    equally as bad or had done bad deeds as well. So they let the
    bad actors out because they thought there were new bad actors,
    and they kind of opened the door for everybody.
        Under that preclearance requirement, certain jurisdictions,
    predominantly in the deep south that had a history of
    discriminatory voting methods, they were required to obtain the
    approval of the Justice Department or the U.S. District Court
    for the District of Columbia before any proposed changes to
    voting practices or procedures could take effect. That
    preclearance requirement was crucial to vigorous and effective
    enforcement of the Act's guarantee of equal voting rights.
        The purpose of this preclearance requirement is to ensure
    the jurisdictions that are most likely to discriminate against
    minority voters would bear the burden of proving that any
    change to their voting laws were not discriminatory, rather
    than placing the burden of proof on discrimination victims. By
    placing the burden on jurisdictions with a history of
    discrimination to prove their innocence, Section 5 rightly
    prevented potentially discriminatory voting practices from
    taking effect before they could harm minority voters. In this
    way, Section 5 proved to be a significant means of protection
    for the rights of minority voters.
        Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits
    discrimination voting and remains in effect is, by itself, a
    less effective and significantly more cumbersome and expensive
    way to enforce the Act, factors that would dissuade even those
    with meritorious claims from pursuing enforcement litigation.
    Most importantly, plaintiffs cannot invoke Section 2 until
    after an alleged harm has taken place, thereby eroding the
    effectiveness of the Act, which is to see that the harm doesn't
    ever take place. The result of these factors would be the many
    practices and restrictions that undermine equal votes will
    simply go unchallenged because the harm has been done.
        These are reasons why Congress has repeatedly reauthorized
    Section 5 on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, most recently
    in 2006, when the House passed the VRA by a vote of 390-33, in
    the Senate 98-0. So at this time, it wasn't the Congress'
    fault. We were good.
        Incredibly, the Court's majority in Shelby County claimed
    that there was no evidence to support Congress' findings of
    continued discrimination in voting in the then-covered
    jurisdictions, notwithstanding thousands of pages of record
    evidence compiled by this subcommittee in 2006. This
    subcommittee, then in Republican hands, demonstrated a
    continuing need for this coverage formula.
        Telling events since the Shelby County decision have proved
    how wrong the Court was in its conclusion. Within hours of the
    decision, States like Texas and North Carolina that have been
    the subject of the Act's preclearance requirement, announced
    their intent to impose strict voting identification
    requirements. Other States that had also been subject to
    preclearance also wasted no time pursuing voting restrictions,
    and, once again, threatened to undermine the minority of voting
    rights, including practices like restriction or elimination of
    early voting, same-day registration, and bans on ex-offenders
    from voting, all of which make it disproportionately harder for
    racial and ethnic minorities to vote. It has a disparate impact
    against black voters, African American voters.
        Last year's Georgia Governor's race brought into full view
    the range of voter suppression practices in formerly covered
    jurisdictions. It may look subtle when viewed in isolation, but
    are pernicious and devastating in their cumulative effect. As
    Ms. Stacey Abrams, one of our witnesses, the Democratic nominee
    for Governor of Georgia in that race, knows from personal
    experience, her opponent, Brian Kemp, then the Georgia
    Secretary of State, embarked on what were a series of seemingly
    naked attempts to shrink the electorate, which was the job of
    the Secretary of State on those laws, but he chose to go about
    it in a particular manner. He also was her opponent. He is now
    the Governor of Georgia.
        His office purged more than 1.4 million voters from the
    rolls since 2010, including more than 600,000 Georgians in the
    year 2017, and then another 90,000 that were not purged in 2017
    in The Cleanup Act in 2018. Numerous voter registrations were
    cancelled because the voter had not voted in the previous
    election. Georgia also closed a tenth of its polling places
    since 2012, with the majority of closings occurring in poor
    counties, and those with significant African American
    populations.
        Georgia also enacted a, quote, ``exact match,'' unquote,
    law that resulted in 53,000 more voters being given only
    pending status on the voter registration because of minor
    errors on their registration forms, with more than 70 percent
    of those voters being African American. This is exactly the
    kind of attrition on voting rights that preclearance would have
    stopped from going into effect.
        Before the Voting Rights Act, the state of voting rights in
    the deep south was abysmal. In the mid 1950s, only one in four
    African American voters in the south was registered. With this
    robust preclearance requirement, the Act did dramatic positive
    effect on black voting registration in the south, which
    increased to 62 percent just 3 years after the Act became law,
    yet these gains and others are at risk because of the Shelby
    decision.
        The Supreme Court was wrong, in my opinion, to undermine
    the Voting Rights Act. Congress failed to act the last time we
    had a chance to do it. Hopefully, we won't fail again. Congress
    must now respond. It is imperative that we restore the Voting
    Rights Act preclearance requirement, so it is to stay true to
    the Act's purpose of ensuring equal voting rights for all.
        John Lewis and many others risked their lives. John Lewis
    was beaten in the head, marching for voting rights in Selma,
    Alabama. Others were killed in Selma, and other places in the
    south looking for voting rights. Voting rights are so
    important, and we can't let those people's deaths, those
    people's injuries, those people's efforts go for naught.
        I thank our witnesses for being here. I look forward to
    their testimony. I now yield for the opening statement from the
    ranking member, the Honorable gentleman from Louisiana, Mr.
    Johnson.
        Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for
    being here for your interest today. I appreciate the
    opportunity to speak again on the duty and honor that Congress
    has to protect the fundamental right to vote in our country.
    All the sacrifices, the blood and the sweat and the tears that
    were put in by John Lewis and all those other legends and
    patriots and heroes will not be forgotten.
        While some have raised concerns regarding the Supreme
    Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck
    down just one part of the Voting Rights Act, I would like to
    quote again from parts of that decision, because I think if we
    are going to talk about that decision today and its
    ramifications, it serves us well to articulate specifically
    what the Supreme Court actually said in that decision. I think
    the Court aptly described just how far this country has come.
        In its majority decision, the Court laid out the
    Constitutional infirmities of Section 4 of the VRA as follows,
    and I am just going to read you an important excerpt. Quote,
    ``The Framers of the Constitution intended the States to keep
    for themselves, as provided in the 10th Amendment, the power to
    regulate elections. Not only do States retain sovereignty under
    the Constitution, there is also a fundamental principal of
    equal sovereignty among the States. Indeed, the Constitutional
    equality of the States is essential to the harmonious operation
    of the scheme upon which the Republic was organized. Section 4
    of the Voting Rights Act sharply departs from these basic
    principles. It suspends all changes to State election law,
    however innocuous, until they have been precleared by Federal
    authorities in Washington, D.C. In 1966, we found these
    departures from the basic features of our system of government
    justified.
        At the time, the coverage formula, the means of linking the
    exercise via unprecedented authority with the problem that
    warranted it, made sense. Nearly 50 years later, things have
    changed dramatically. In the covered jurisdictions, voter
    turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly
    discriminatory evasions of Federal decrees are rare, and
    minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.
        The tests and devices that blocked access to the ballot
    have been forbidden nationwide for more than 40 years. The 15th
    Amendment commands that the right to vote shall not be denied
    or abridged on account of race or color, and it gives Congress
    the power to enforce that command. The amendment is not
    designed to punish for the past. Its purpose is to ensure a
    better future.
        To serve that purpose, Congress, if it is to divide the
    States, must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on
    the basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. It
    cannot rely simply on the past. Regardless of how to look at
    the record, however, no one can fairly say that it shows
    anything approaching the pervasive, flagrant, widespread, and
    rampant discrimination that faced Congress in 1965, and it
    clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions from the rest
    of the Nation at that time.
        Our country has changed. And while any racial
    discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that
    the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to
    current conditions,'' end of quote.
        That is what the Supreme Court said. And of course, I am
    sure everyone in this room agrees with those sentiments, and I
    have stated this before, Mr. Chairman, myself. At least some on
    this side agreed with what the Court said.
        Of course, we all agree that discriminatory treatment in
    voting based on race or sex is abhorrent. It is prohibited by
    the Constitution, as it should be. It is prohibited by Federal
    statue, as it should be. Regarding discriminatory treatment in
    voting that is based on race, Section 3 of the Voting Rights
    Act, which is permanent Federal statutory law, remains in place
    and full effect, as it should be.
        Several years ago, for example, U.S. District Judge Lee
    Rosenthal issued an opinion in a redistricting case that
    required the City of Pasadena, Texas, to be monitored by the
    Justice Department because it had intentionally changed its
    city council districts to decrease influence by citizens of
    Hispanic descent. The city, which the Court ruled, has a,
    quote, ``long history of discrimination against minorities,''
    unquote, was required to have their future voting rules changes
    precleared by the Department of Justice for the next 6 years
    during which time the Federal judge, quote, ``retains
    jurisdiction to review before enforcement any change in the
    election map or plan that was in effect in Pasadena on December
    1, 2013,'' unquote.
        A change to the city's election plan can be enforced
    without review by the judge only it if has been submitted to
    the U.S. Attorney General, and the Justice Department has not
    objected within 60 days.
        We support Section 3 in its application to proven instances
    of discriminatory treatment in voting, and I look forward to
    hearing from all of our witnesses here today. That testimony
    will include that of the Office of the Texas Attorney General,
    which I understand has argued in the Supreme Court 31 times
    since 2000, and they have either completely or substantially
    won the vast majority of those cases. The Texas Attorney
    General's Office has argued two of the most important VRA cases
    in recent memory, Evenwel and Perez, and won them both. In
    those decisions, Texas won a total of 13 votes at the Court for
    its position compared to just four votes against. This is an
    office with a proven track record of legal acumen and
    understanding confirmed at the highest levels, and by the U.S.
    Supreme Court itself.
        Thank you all, again, for your time and testimony. We look
    forward to hearing from you, and I yield back.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Johnson.
        It is now my pleasure to recognize the chairman of the full
    committee, who was the chairman of this committee for many
    years, and today I will announce him as the chairman emeritus
    of this subcommittee, but the chairman, I guess, is emeritus of
    all committees. Mr. Nadler.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is one of the most effective
    civil rights statutes that has ever been enacted into law. Six
    years ago today, however, the Supreme Court issued its
    disastrous decision in Shelby County v. Holder, thereby
    effectively gutting one of the Act's central enforcement
    provisions known as the preclearance requirement, when it
    struck down as unconstitutional the Act's coverage formula,
    which determined which jurisdictions would be subject to the
    preclearance requirement.
        Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act contains a preclearance
    provision that requires certain jurisdictions with a history of
    discrimination to submit any changes to their voting laws or
    practices to the Department of Justice for prior approval to
    ensure that they are not discriminatory.
        To understand why the preclearance requirement was so
    central to enforcing the VRA, it is worth remembering why it
    was enacted in the first place. Before the Voting Rights Act,
    States and localities passed voter suppression laws, securing
    the knowledge that it could take many years before the laws
    could be successfully challenged in court, if at all. As soon
    as one law was overturned, another would be enacted,
    essentially setting up a discriminatory game of whack a mole.
    Section 5's preclearance provision broke this legal logjam and
    helped to stop this discriminatory practice.
        Indeed, the success of the Voting Rights Act with this
    effective preclearance requirement was apparent almost
    immediately after the law went into effect. For instance,
    registration of African Americans voters more than doubled in
    the south within just 4 years of enactment. Similarly, African
    American voter turnout rose from only 6 percent to 59 percent
    in just 4 years in Mississippi, and it soared to 92 percent in
    Tennessee, 77 percent in Arkansas, and 73 percent in Texas in
    that same period.
        The Voting Rights Act's success can also be measured in
    terms of the number of African Americans holding elected
    office, jumping from barely 100 prior to the VRA's enactment to
    more than 7,200 today, with 4,800 holding elected office in the
    south alone. Moreover, the number of African Americans in
    Congress doubled almost immediately after the Voting Rights Act
    was enacted; and today, there are 56 African American Members
    of Congress. And of course, in 2008, the country elected its
    first African American President.
        In short, the Voting Rights Act was an unqualified success,
    and much of that success can be attributed to the ability to
    enforce it vigorously. Central to the ability to enforce
    vigorously the Act was its preclearance provision. By striking
    down the formula for determining which States and localities
    are subject to the preclearance requirement, the Shelby County
    decision effectively suspended the operation of the
    preclearance requirement itself, and in its absence, the game
    of whack a mole has returned with a vengeance.
        Within 24 hours of the Shelby County decision, for example,
    the Texas Attorney General and North Carolina's General
    Assembly announced that they would reinstitute draconian voter
    ID laws. Both of these States' laws were later held in Federal
    courts to be intentionally, intentionally, racially
    discriminatory. But during the years between their enactment
    and the Court's final decision, many elections were conducted
    while the discriminatory laws remained in place. At least 21
    other States have also enacted newly restrictive statewide
    voter laws since the Shelby County decision.
        Restoring the vitality of the Voting Rights Act is of
    critical importance. In 2006, when I was the ranking member of
    this subcommittee, we undertook an exhaustive process to build
    a record that demonstrated unequivocally the need to
    reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, provisions of which, like
    the preclearance requirement and the coverage formula that
    undergirded it, were expiring. At the time, the committee found
    that a majority of southern States were still engaged in
    ongoing discrimination. For instance, these States in the
    subdivisions engaged in racially discriminatory practices, such
    as relocating polling places for African Americans voters, and
    in the case of localities, annexing certain wards simply to
    satisfy white suburban voters who sought to circumvent the
    ability of African Americans to have a fair chance for elected
    office in their cities.
        Since the Shelby County decision, we have also seen the
    emergence of other voter suppression measures, like burdensome
    proof of citizenship laws, significant scale-backs to early
    voting periods, restrictions and absentee ballots, and laws
    that make it difficult to restore the voting rights of formerly
    incarcerated individuals. These kinds of voting practices have
    a disproportionate negative impact on minority voters.
        In the most recent elections in November of 2018, voters
    across the country encountered barriers to voting from State
    and local laws and circumstances that made it hard, or even
    impossible, to vote. For example, as our witness, Stacey
    Abrams, can attest to, in Georgia, 53,000 voter registrants, 70
    percent of whom are African American, were replaced in pending
    status by the Secretary of State, who was also, by
    happenstance, Ms. Abrams' election opponent, because of minor
    misspellings on their registration forms.
        A Federal court ultimately put a stop to this practice on
    November 2, 2018, 4 days before the election, because of the,
    quote, ``differential treatment inflicted on a group of
    individuals who were predominantly minorities,'' closed quote.
        While it is true that those seeking to enforce the Voting
    Rights Act can still pursue after-the-fact legal remedies even
    without preclearance, time and experience have proven that such
    an approach takes far longer and is far more expensive than
    having an effective preclearance regime. And once the vote has
    been denied, it cannot be recast. The damage to our democracy
    is permanent. That is why I hope the members on both sides of
    the aisle and in both Chambers of Congress will come together
    and pass legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act to its
    full vitality. The Supreme Court left us instructions on how to
    enact a new Section 4 that would pass constitutional muster.
        Today's hearing will provide an important opportunity to
    renew our understanding of the importance of the Voting Rights
    Act and its preclearance provision, and to support our efforts
    to craft a legislative solution to restore, where needed, the
    preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. I thank our
    witnesses, and I look forward to their testimony.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Chairman Nadler.
        It is now my pleasure to recognize the ranking member of
    the full committee, the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Collins,
    for his opening statement.
        Mr. Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and it is good to be
    here, and it is good to have a hearing like this, if for no
    other reason, to at least correct the record and things that
    have already been said.
        Number one. In Georgia, the six counties mentioned, it is a
    reminder that in Georgia, all six of those counties are under
    local control on where they actually place their voting times--
    their voting locations, how many they actually use, and that
    has been that way for a long time. We will get into more
    discussion about that.
        It is interesting that we also talk about scaling back
    early voting in others, because as we will find out in this
    hearing, myself and actually a witness here today, voted to
    scale back 3 weeks in Georgia, and add a Saturday. And at the
    time, it was actually attested to on many occasions that it
    showed no discriminatory impact.
        In fact, actually, some of what we found was actually
    helpful to minority turnout in that. So as we look at this,
    this is the reason to have a hearing, and I am glad to see
    friends and witnesses who are here today.
        But the right to vote is of paramount importance in a
    democracy. Its protection of discriminatory barriers has been
    grounded in Federal law since the Civil War, and more recently,
    through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Supreme
    Court struck down a single part of the Voting Rights Act,
    Section 4. That provision automatically put certain States and
    political subdivisions under the Act's Section 5 preclearance
    requirements. Those preclearance requirements prevented voting
    rule changes in covered jurisdictions from going into effect
    until the new rules had been reviewed and approved, either
    following a lawsuit in the D.C. District Court, or by more
    often, the Department of Justice.
        When the Voting Rights Act was first enacted, Section 4
    identified the jurisdictions automatically subject to the
    special preclearance requirements according to a formula. The
    first part of the formula provided a State or political
    subdivision would be covered if it maintained on November 1,
    1964, a test or device restricting the opportunity to register
    and vote.
        The second piece provided a State or political subdivision
    would also be covered if the Census director determined that
    less than 50 percent of the persons of voting age were
    registered to vote on November 1, 1964, or less than 50 percent
    of the voting age voted in the 1964 presidential election.
        In its Shelby County decision, the Supreme Court struck
    down these automatic preclearance provisions, ruling the
    original coverage formula was, quote, ``based on decades-old
    data and eradicated practices.'' In 1965, the States could be
    divided into two groups, those with a recent history of voting
    test and low voter registration and turnout, and those without
    those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on
    that distinction.
        Today, we see a different place, and yet, the Voting Rights
    Act continued to treat it as if it were still in that time. The
    courts further criticized Section 4's formula as relying on
    decades-old irrelevant data to decades-old problems rather than
    current data reflecting current needs.
        In Shelby County, the Supreme Court only struck down that
    single, outdated provision of the VRA. Significantly, other
    very important provisions of the Voting Rights Act remain
    firmly in place, including Section 2 and Section 3.
        Section 2 applies nationwide, prohibits voting practices or
    procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or
    the ability to speak English, like other Federal civil rights
    laws. Section 2 is enforced via Federal lawsuits. The United
    States and civil rights organizations have brought Section 2
    cases in court, and still may do so in the future.
        Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act also remains in place,
    authorizing Federal courts to impose on States and political
    subdivisions that have enacted voting procedures treating
    people differently based on race in violation of the 14th and
    15th amendments. If the court finds a State or political
    subdivision treated people differently based on race, the court
    has the discretion to retain supervisory jurisdiction and
    impose preclearance requirements on the State or political
    subdivision as the court sees fit until a future date. This
    means that a State or political subdivision would have to
    submit all future voting rules and changes for approval to
    either the court itself or the Department of Justice before
    enacting those changes.
        Per the Code of Federal Regulations, under Section 3(c) of
    the Voting Rights Act, a court in voting rights litigation can
    order, as relief, that a jurisdiction not subject to a
    preclearance requirement of Section 5 preclearance voting
    changes by submitting them to the court, or to the Attorney
    General.
        Americans continue to safeguard voting rights for every
    citizen. Increased voter turnout reflects that commitment. In
    my home State of Georgia, which has been mentioned many times
    already, and will probably be again, voter turnout has expanded
    mightily. Between 2014 and 2018, turnout among Hispanics and
    African American voters has soared, increasing by double digits
    in a State that more and more Americans are choosing to call
    home.
        I look forward to discussing more of that, and hearing that
    as we go forward, but also look forward to ensuring that the
    ballot box remains open to all eligible voters, and I am
    looking forward to this hearing. I appreciate the witnesses
    being here. I am sure this will be an interesting discussion in
    which hearings tend to set facts straight. And with that, I
    yield back.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Collins.
        We welcome all of our witnesses. Thank you for your
    indulgence in allowing Ms. Clarke to testify and make her
    train. I explained to you about the lights: 4 minutes green,
    yellow, you have got a minute left. Red, you don't have to go
    to the train, but you have to stop. You are all under the
    statutes that say that if you say anything that is false in
    your testimony, perjury, you are subject to up to 5 years in
    prison or both for making such a statement, so all your written
    and oral statements to the subcommittee shall be truthful and
    honest. I am sure of that.
        Our first witness is Ms. Stacey Abrams. Ms. Abrams is the
    founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, an organization
    dedicated to advancing voting rights and electoral reform. In
    2018, she was the Democratic nominee for Governor of the State
    of Georgia, the first African American woman in U.S. history
    nominated by a major party as its nominee for Governor. In that
    election, she received the highest voter turnout of any
    Democratic candidate in Georgia's history.
        Prior to running for Governor, she served in the Georgia
    General Assembly from 2007 to 2017, serving as the House
    minority leader from 2010 to 2017, and became the first woman
    to lead a party in the Georgia General Assembly, and the first
    African American leader of a party in the State House of
    Representatives. She received her J.D. degree from Yale Law
    School, and her Master of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of
    Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and her
    B.A., magnum cum laude, from Spelman College.
        Ms. Abrams, you are recognized for 5 minutes. We appreciate
    your attendance.

                    STATEMENT OF HON. STACEY ABRAMS

        Ms. Abrams. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
    Johnson, committee members. Thank you for allowing me to
    address this important hearing today.
        The Shelby decision created a new channel for the troubling
    practice of voter suppression during a time of dramatic
    demographic change. However, no assault on democracy will ever
    be limited to its targets. As the franchise is weakened, all
    citizens feel the effects, which is why restoration of the full
    power of the Voting Rights Act must occur.
        I come today because I was raised in Mississippi, where my
    parents joined the civil rights movement as teenagers, and they
    instilled in their six children a deep respect for the right to
    vote. I came of age in Georgia where I registered voters while
    in college, served as Georgia House minority leader, and where
    I stood for office as the Democratic nominee for Governor in
    2018.
        Jurisdictions formerly covered under Section 5, joined now
    by States with changing demographics, have raced to reinstate,
    or create new hurdles to voter registration, ballot access, and
    ballot counting. Among the States, however, Georgia, has been
    one of the most aggressive in leveraging the lack of Federal
    oversight to use both law and policy to target voters of color.
        In 2014, I founded The New Georgia Project, one of the
    State's largest voter registration organizations. Minorities
    are twice as likely to register through third-party
    registration as are whites. Post Shelby, legislation and
    practices in States like Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina,
    Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida, seek to impede these activities.
    Then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was also
    responsible for the oversight of local elections officials,
    refused to take action to process registration forms in a
    timely manner. Later, we discovered unpublished internal rules,
    such as the 90-day blackout period during which no voter
    registration forms were processed, causing delays that denied
    registrants the right to vote. In 2017, citizens challenged and
    eliminated the secret policy through the Federal courts.
        Due to the volume of new Georgia Project registrations,
    which we tracked via paper ballots, we also proved the racially
    discriminatory effect of the exact match process which requires
    perfect data entry by government employees to secure a proper
    registration. In 2009, under preclearance requirements, the
    Justice Department summarily rejected exact match as
    presenting, quote, ``real, substantial, and retrogressive
    burdens on voters of color.''
        Post Shelby, however, Mr. Kemp implemented the discredited
    exact match policies empowered by a lack of Justice Department
    preclearance. In 2016, Mr. Kemp agreed to process approximately
    34,000 suspended applications. Despite this 2016 Federal
    settlement, Kemp ushered another iteration of exact match
    through the State legislature in 2017, leading to 53,000
    suspended voter registrations in 2018, 70 percent of whom were
    black voters, who comprise roughly 30 percent of Georgia's
    eligible voters.
        Remaining on the voter rolls also poses challenges. Under
    Kemp's post-Shelby regime, facially neutral rules for removing
    voters who have died or left the State, became tools for voter
    purges. In total, he removed over 1.4 million voters from the
    rolls, including purging half a million voters in a single day
    in 2017, an 8 percent reduction in Georgia's voting population.
    An estimated 107,000 of these voters were removed through
    arguably unconstitutional application of the use-it-or-lose-it
    law.
        One of the most pernicious effects of Shelby can be found
    in the very act of casting a vote. Section 5 provided an
    effective check against hyperlocal suppressive tactics, like
    excessive poll closures, or challenge proceedings against
    voters of color as occurred in Georgia in 2015. Of 159 counties
    in Georgia, 156 counties removed the highest rate of voters
    from the rolls post Shelby, which resulted in an increase in
    the number of voter being forced to cast provisional ballots.
        Last election cycle, separate Federal courts ruled against
    Georgia policies for rejecting absentee ballots and valid
    applications under trivial pretenses for implementing an
    inconsistent provisional ballot system, and for improperly
    disallowing access to translators in the polling booths. While
    these lawsuits brought remedy to some, thousands more may have
    faced similar discrimination, without the resources or the
    knowledge to gain relief.
        Post Shelby voting rights groups must too often rely on
    resource-intensive litigation and advocacy work to protect the
    fundamental right to vote for voters of color. This anti-voting
    system has the concomitant effect of harming taxpayers as
    States must expend tax dollars to defend voter suppression in
    court.
        At the end of the 2018 contest, I acknowledged the legal
    result of an election marred by widespread election
    irregularities. I also redoubled my commitment to voting rights
    through the creation of Fair Fight Action, which has filed a
    federal lawsuit against the Georgia electoral system, asking
    for Georgia's preclearance requirement to be reinstated under
    Section 3. The proposed Voting Rights Advancement Act, and
    Voting Rights Amendment Act, represent considerable progress
    towards restoring the power of the Voting Rights Act, including
    modern-day protections that require nationwide preclearance to
    attack the broad reach of voter suppression.
        I strongly urge Congress to take action today, and I thank
    you for the opportunity to address this committee.
        [The statement of Ms. Abrams follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Mr. Cohen. Thank you very much, Ms. Abrams, and you were
    perfect on 5 minutes.
        Ms. Abrams. Not my first rodeo.
        Mr. Cohen. Not many people have been to a rodeo on this
    committee. You have not been a witness.
        Mr. Armstrong. I have been to a rodeo.
        Mr. Cohen. Okay. Good. Good. Good. Thank you. So have I.
        Mr. Kyle Hawkins, who has been to a rodeo, I presume, is
    the Solicitor General of Texas. He represents the State in high
    profile matters before the Federal and State appellate courts,
    including the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Hawkins
    previously practiced law in Washington, D.C. in the Dallas
    office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP, where he was a member
    of the appellate and constitutional law practice group. He also
    served as law clerk to the Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr.,
    Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court, and the
    Honorable Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
    Fifth Circuit.
        Mr. Hawkins is a summa cum laude graduate of the University
    of Minnesota Law School, and received his undergraduate degree,
    magna cum laude, from Harvard. You have been to a rodeo?
        Mr. Hawkins. I have been to many rodeos, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Cohen. Good. You are recognized for 5 minutes, sir.
    Thank you.

                     STATEMENT OF HON. KYLE HAWKINS

        Mr. Hawkins. Chairman Cohen, Ranking Member Johnson, and
    members of the subcommittee, thank you very much for inviting
    me here today to testify about the Supreme Court's decision in
    Shelby County v. Holder.
        In Shelby County, the Supreme Court held that the coverage
    formula subjecting certain jurisdictions to preclearance under
    Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. When
    Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it imposed a
    novel restriction known as preclearance on various southern
    States and localities that shared two characteristics: the use
    of tests and devices for voter registration, and the voting
    rate in the 1964 presidential election at least 12 points below
    the national average.
        Congress tailored the original formula to include those
    States, because it found that widespread and persistent
    discrimination in voting in the early 1960s had typically
    entailed the misuse of test and devices, and this was the evil
    for which the remedies were specifically designed.
        The Supreme Court emphasized in Shelby County that the
    Constitution's allocation of power to the Federal Government
    and the States preserves the integrity, dignity, and residual
    sovereignty of the States. The Court explained that the
    Constitution also incorporates the fundamental principle of
    equal sovereignty among the States, and the powers reserved to
    the States by the Framers include broad authority over the
    conduct of elections.
        As the Supreme Court specifically noted in Shelby County,
    the Framers of the Constitution intended the States to keep for
    themselves as provided in the Tenth Amendment the power to
    regulate elections, that is, States have broad powers to
    determine the conditions under which the right of suffrage may
    be exercised.
        Preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is
    inconsistent with those central pillars of federalism because
    it forbids States to enforce their duly enacted voting laws
    until they secure permission from the Federal Government.
    Preclearance is thus an extraordinary measure that entails, as
    the Court put it in Shelby County, a drastic departure from the
    basic principles of federalism. So the real question at issue
    in Shelby County was whether the on-the-ground conditions were
    sufficient to justify that drastic departure.
        The Supreme Court squarely held no. Specifically, it held
    that preclearance must be reserved for extraordinary situations
    in which a jurisdiction is guilty of pervasive, flagrant,
    widespread, and rampant discrimination that cannot be remedied
    through normal litigation. That is, preclearance is justified
    only when the State is so determined to evade the commands of
    the 14th or 15th Amendments, that its citizens will be unable
    to protect their constitutional rights through traditional
    litigation under existing law.
        To be sure, the Supreme Court has recognized past
    situations sufficient to justify preclearance. The
    extraordinary burdens of a preclearance regime could be
    appropriate in a world in which aggrieved citizens are unable
    to use traditional litigation to secure relief against a
    State's flagrantly unconstitutional voting laws. In 1965,
    Congress found that those conditions existed in the States
    originally targeted by the preclearance regime, and the Supreme
    Court upheld that use of preclearance in the Katzenbach case.
        However, more than 50 years later, recent voting rights
    litigation in Texas shows that traditional litigation is more
    than adequate to identify and prevent violations of the
    Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. The courts have not
    hesitated to identify potential legal violations, and the Texas
    legislature has acted promptly to address them.
        For example, in litigation over Texas' voter identification
    law, the State agreed to a temporary remedial order to address
    a claim under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In the next
    legislative session, the Texas legislature amended its voter
    identification law to incorporate the court-ordered remedy,
    which allows individuals who cannot secure a qualifying photo
    ID, to cast a regular in-person ballot by executing an
    affidavit at the polls.
        The Fifth Circuit later held that the amended statute
    provided an effective remedy for the only deficiencies
    testified to in the preexisting law. Those actions bear no
    resemblance to the conduct that justified preclearance in 1965,
    when officials in certain States routinely took steps to evade
    Federal court orders and prolong their resistance to the 15th
    Amendment. Rather than try to stay one step ahead of the courts
    in an effort to defy the Constitution, the State of Texas has
    followed the court's lead in an effort to conform its voting
    laws to the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. Under
    governing Supreme Court authority, those conditions cannot
    justify preclearance.
        Thank you, again, for inviting me to testify. I look
    forward to your questions.
        [The statement of Mr. Hawkins follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, sir.
        Our next witness is Ms. Leah Aden, Deputy Director of
    Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. She
    was a member of the Legal Defense Fund's litigation team in
    Shelby County v. Holder. Since that decision, she successfully
    led the Legal Defense Fund's efforts to block the
    implementation of discriminatory voting changes. She has also
    recently authored ``Democracy Diminished: State and Local
    Threats to Voting Post Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder,''
    which details State, county, and local voting changes proposed
    or implemented during the more than 3 years since the Supreme
    Court decision in Shelby County, and continues to track post-
    Shelby County voting changes.
        She received her J.D. from Howard University School of Law
    and a B.A. in History and African American Studies from
    Columbia University, and also served as law clerk for the
    Honorable John T. Nixon, who is a friend of mine at the U.S.
    District Court of Appeals for the Middle District of Tennessee,
    a very great judge, unusual, and a wonderful human being.
        Ms. Aden, you are recognized for 5 minutes.

                       STATEMENT OF LEAH C. ADEN

        Ms. Aden. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chairman Cohen,
    Ranking Member Johnson, and Chairman Nadler, and other members
    of the subcommittee. Again, my name is Leah Aden, and I am a
    Deputy Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and
    Educational Fund. Thank you for the opportunity to share
    information about what LDF has observed regarding barriers to
    voting since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby
    County, Alabama versus Holder.
        Since its founding in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall, LDF's
    mission is, and has always been, to promote racial justice and
    equality. Beginning with Smith v. Allwright, a case arising out
    of Texas, our successful Supreme Court case challenged the use
    of all whites primary elections in 1944. And since then, LDF
    has fought to overcome the myriad of obstacles put before black
    voters to ensure our full, equal, and active participation in
    American life.
        The right to vote for black people today, and for other
    people of color is facing its greatest threat in decades. As
    you know, the Shelby County decision invalidated the
    preclearance provision of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,
    removing the obligation of jurisdictions with a history and
    ongoing record of discrimination from submitting proposed
    voting changes to a Federal authority for approval. This
    process ensured that those changes would not discriminate
    against African American and other voters.
        The result of the Shelby decision was predictable. As
    Chairmen Cohen and Nadler have mentioned, within hours of the
    decision, the Texas Attorney General tweeted out his intention
    to implement a photo ID law that the State had been forbidden
    from implementing under Section 5. Other jurisdictions,
    including Alabama, followed suit. Even more alarming, voter
    suppression has metastasized in the years since the Shelby
    decision with places like Wisconsin, North Dakota, and
    jurisdictions in Kansas adopting laws and practices which
    result in voter suppression.
        Since the Shelby decision, LDF has tracked and recorded
    discriminatory voting changes in places previously protected by
    Section 5 that we can become aware of, and we do so in a
    regularly updated report, Democracy Diminished, and we have
    provided copies of this report to each member of this
    committee. Our documentation and examination of the plethora of
    discriminatory voting changes proposed or implemented since
    Shelby, our annual Election Day voter protection work, and our
    own experience litigating cases, challenging voter suppression
    schemes enables LDF to state, unequivocally, that there is a
    critical and urgent need for Congress to act to restore and
    strengthen the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.
        The genius of Congress' Section 5 preclearance mechanism is
    that it stopped discrimination before the harm occurred. While
    we still have Section 2, as you all have heard, that authorizes
    us to challenge discriminatory voting practices in Federal
    courts, it is not enough. Even when we are successful
    litigating these cases, the relief comes too late and at too
    great a cost in terms of time, money, and burden, for hundreds
    of thousands of voters. Millions.
        One case dramatically illustrates this. We successfully
    challenged Texas' voter ID law, judicially recognized as the
    most stringent voter ID law in the country. The trial court
    found that the law violated Section 2's results test and was
    enacted intentionally to discriminate against African American
    and Latino voters. We proved at trial that more than a half
    million registered voters, and up to a million eligible voters
    were disenfranchised by the ID law. The Fifth Circuit Court of
    Appeals affirmed that the law violated the Voting Rights Act.
        But during the 3 years in which we litigated the case
    through trial, and before voters received relief, Texas elected
    a U.S. Senator, all 36 members of the Texas delegation to the
    U.S. House of Representatives, a Governor, a Lieutenant
    Governor, Attorney General, Controller, all 150 Members of the
    State house, over 175 trial court judges, and over 75 District
    Attorneys. Relief simply was too late for voters across all of
    those elections.
        Since Shelby, Federal courts have found that officials in
    five different States have passed racially discriminatory
    voting laws, intentionally for the purpose of discriminating
    against black and Latino voters. Ms. Clarke mentioned the North
    Carolina case.
        There is a voter suppression crisis in our country, and
    Congress has an obligation to use the enforcement powers it was
    bestowed in the 14th and 15th Amendment to the U.S.
    Constitution, to amend the Voting Rights Act to protect
    minority voters from racially discriminatory voting schemes.
        The Supreme Court, in Shelby, rejected Congress'
    determination, despite the extensive record that Congress
    amassed that the preclearance process was necessary. The court,
    in particular, as you have heard, objected to what it regarded
    as a targeting of mostly southern States.
        I agree with you, Chairman Cohen, that Congress got it
    wrong in Shelby, and substituted its own judgment for Congress,
    but the Shelby decision is the law, and any effort by this body
    to amended the Voting Rights Act must be undertaken with
    attention to the court's guidance in that case. H.R. 4 does
    precisely that. It proposes a nationwide formula without
    geographic limitation that will require any jurisdiction that
    engages in systematic discrimination to submit voting changes
    to a Federal authority for preclearance.
        And I look forward to hearing your questions and being able
    to answer them.
        [The statement of Ms. Aden follows:]
        [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Mr. Cohen. Thank you. And I will proceed first with the 5-
    minute rule and recognize myself.
        First, in your statement, I believe you said the court had
    it--Congress had it wrong and the court had it right. Is that
    what--did I hear it wrong, or did you say it wrong?
        Ms. Aden. If I misstate, misspoke, I definitely mean that
    Congress had it absolutely right, and the Supreme Court had it
    wrong.
        Mr. Cohen. I thought that is what it was. Yeah. Congress
    finally got it right.
        Ms. Aden. And they got it right on multiple times over
    multiplied decades under different administrations.
        Mr. Cohen. Right after the Holder case, Texas had a photo
    ID law. Ms. Aden, do you know what happened with the attack on
    that law and what the Supreme Court--what the courts ruled in
    those voter ID?
        Ms. Aden. I know it quite well, because I am part of the
    team among many members who have been litigating that case now
    for 7 or 8 years.
        So we have to step back and also remember that the Texas
    photo ID law, which has been recognized as the strictest in the
    Nation at one time, was adopted in the context of a legislature
    that had also adopted racially discriminatory voting plans that
    had been found to be intentionally discriminatory for the State
    House and for Congress.
        That same body, post 2010, adopted a strict photo ID law,
    and it was blocked by Section 5, because the record then, as
    the record came to show after trial and after several appeals,
    prohibited up to 600,000 registered Texas voters, and up to 1
    million eligible voters to vote. This was a law that was
    crafted to allow people with handgun licenses
    disproportionately held by white voters, to vote, but student
    IDs, tribal IDs, Native American tribal IDs, Federal and State
    employee IDs were carved out of that law, so that people could
    not participate in the political process.
        We went to trial in 2014, and the Court found that the law
    violated the results test of Section 2, and also violated
    various provisions of the U.S. Constitution. That case went up,
    and the en banc court of the Fifth Circuit confirmed that that
    law, and by ``en banc,'' I mean the full panel of the Fifth
    Circuit affirmed that that law has discriminatory results. And
    our position is that the--and subsequently, remanded the case.
        There was an interim remedy. Well, frankly, Texas had to be
    forced to come up with a remedy for voting--for its
    discriminatory photo ID law. They had to be forced after they
    were told by Section 5, after people provided testimony before
    them, that the law was discriminatory, they had to be forced
    into an interim remedy. That interim remedy was subsequently
    upheld by another three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit.
    Frankly, our position is that that decision did not disturb the
    intent ruling.
        Mr. Cohen. Was that remedy that possibly the law that Mr.
    Hawkins said was passed----
        Ms. Aden. Yeah, and that is part of----
        Mr. Cohen [continuing]. But was that after an election had
    taken place?
        Ms. Aden. That was after many elections.
        Mr. Cohen. So what remedy was available to those voters who
    were affected by a law that the court said was discriminatory?
        Ms. Aden. Absolutely none. Millions, if not hundreds of
    thousands of votes were lost after----
        Mr. Cohen. So it is not a rodeo, but the cattle are out of
    the barn. They have gone. There is nothing you can do at that
    point.
        Ms. Aden. They are over. People have been elected. That was
    genius behind Section 5, that Congress understood that
    elections would take place, and we need to block harm before
    elections take place, before the cancer of racial
    discrimination takes root, before people get the benefit of
    discrimination, and the victims of discrimination have to then
    race into court at the cost of hundreds of thousand, if not
    millions of dollars, to uproot discrimination.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you so much.
        Ms. Abrams, Mr. Hawkins said in his written testimony that
    the current conditions in terms of voting rights aren't so bad,
    that we have really done a great job, and it is not like 1965,
    and we are just doing wonderful, good things, in essence, and
    the preclearance requirement is not necessary. In other words,
    he thinks the Supreme Court got it right in Shelby when he
    concluded that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority
    to impose preclearance requirements on certain States and
    localities. This is federalism, but sometimes the States go too
    far, and they interfere with the Federal statutes or Federal
    constitutional privileges, and then the Feds have to come in.
        What do you think about Mr. Hawkins' position that we don't
    need the preclearance requirement anymore?
        Ms. Abrams. I vehemently disagree. I grew up in
    Mississippi, I live in Georgia, and I recently went through a
    fairly public display of the need for preclearance. Mr. Kemp,
    the current Governor, then Secretary of State, had been denied
    the ability to impose the exact match policy under
    preclearance. The moment Shelby was passed, he reinstituted
    this policy.
        In 2016, he had to enter into a Federal settlement, because
    34,000 voters were denied the right to vote in an election
    cycle; in fact, over two elections cycles. He agreed to the
    settlement in 2016, and the very next year, ushered through a
    different iteration of the exact same discriminatory policy.
    And in 2018, a third court told him to stop it because--sorry,
    a second court, because 53,000 voters were suspended from being
    able to register to vote. That is a small kernel of an example.
        The State of Georgia has found itself in multiple lawsuits
    where upon adjudication, the State has been told that their
    actions were racially discriminatory. That means that people
    have been denied the right to vote. They will never be able to
    unring that bell. And I believe that preclearance--in fact, we
    know empirically that preclearance would have permitted more
    voters to cast their ballots because the policies that denied
    them the right to vote would not have been enacted.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you. And I just have to say, because it is
    one of the things I think about a lot. You said you are from
    Mississippi, and I want to say some nice things about Nina
    Simone.
        Ms. Abrams. Thank you.
        Mr. Cohen. You are welcome.
        Mr. Johnson, you are recognized.
        Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Hawkins, Texas has been evoked a number of times today,
    and at the outset, let me just ask you: Is there anything that
    has been said here today or submitted in the written record
    that you would like to respond to as Solicitor General of that
    State?
        Mr. Hawkins. Yes, Representative. I would like to do that.
    Thank you for the opportunity. There has been a lot said about
    the Texas voter ID law and litigation, and I would like to set
    the record straight on that.
        First, no District Court has ever found that any number of
    voters were disenfranchised. The Fifth Circuit found that 95
    percent of Texas voters already had a qualifying photo ID, and
    the ones who didn't could simply get a qualifying photo ID to
    comply with that law, which, by the way, has been supplanted by
    new legislation and is now obsolete. That is not
    disenfranchisement under any reasonable definition.
        In any event, the notion that minority voters were targeted
    by the voter ID law was contradicted by the plaintiff's own
    expert witness, who offered data showing that the small
    percentage of Texans who did not already have a qualifying
    photo ID, the majority of them were white voters.
        I would also like to speak to the importance of voter ID
    set against the context of Supreme Court precedent. The Supreme
    Court held, in Crawford v. Marion County, that voter ID laws
    serve the legitimate State interest of protecting the integrity
    and reliability of the electoral process and increasing public
    confidence in elections.
        As former President Jimmy Carter once explained, the
    electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no
    safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud, or to confirm the
    identity of voters. The Texas legislature studied this issue
    and concluded that in-person voter fraud is a problem. The
    legislature concluded in reliance on Crawford, and on the
    Carter Baker report, that a photo ID requirement would help
    combat in-person voter fraud. Furthermore, voter ID is a key
    method for detecting in-person voter fraud. It is very hard to
    spot in-person voter fraud absent a photo ID requirement.
        Finally, I think the Supreme Court's decision in Purcell v.
    Gonzalez, is very instructive on this point, and I would like
    to briefly read the key portion of the Supreme Court's binding
    analysis:
        ``A State indisputably has a compelling interest in
    preserving the integrity of its election process. Confidence in
    the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the
    functioning of our participatory democracy. Voter fraud drives
    honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds
    distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate
    votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel
    disenfranchised. The right of suffrage can be denied by a
    debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just
    as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of
    the franchise.'' That is a quote from Purcell v. Gonzalez.
        Just a couple of other points on the voter ID litigation.
    There were 14 individual plaintiffs in that case, and the
    evidence showed that not a single one of those plaintiffs had
    been disenfranchised. Nine of them were eligible to vote by
    mail without a photo ID. Three had a compliant ID. One chose to
    get a California ID instead of a Texas ID, and one had the
    documents that were necessary to get an ID.
        Finally, voter turnout was unaffected in the elections
    following the implementation of S. 14, which was the voter ID
    law at issue there. As I indicated, the Texas legislature
    passed a new voter ID law, S. 5. That is now law in Texas. It
    has not been challenged.
        Mr. Johnson. Thank you for clarifying the record. That is
    important today. Could you walk us through how a generic case
    could be brought under Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act? In
    other words, in what steps would it proceed?
        Mr. Hawkins. Yes, Representative. I would be happy to do
    that. That raises an important point that Section 2 and Section
    3 of the Voting Rights Act remain fully intact notwithstanding
    the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County. I believe all of
    the witnesses before the subcommittee today agree on that
    point.
        When somebody believes that they are the victim of
    intentional discrimination, they can bring an action under the
    Voting Rights Act Section 2. And if, indeed, the conditions are
    those that resemble the conditions in 1965 that justified
    preclearance in the first place, Section 3(c) provides a remedy
    to address that called the bail in process.
        The bail in process is like a targeted form of
    preclearance. It can be set for a certain amount of time, it
    can cover certain areas. It is a surgical ability to impose a
    type of preclearance regime on a locality that truly
    demonstrates the same conditions that existed in the early
    1960s that justified preclearance in the first place. Those two
    parts of the Voting Rights Act are still very much in place.
    They are being litigated to this day, notwithstanding Shelby
    County 6 years ago which had nothing to do with those
    provisions.
        Mr. Johnson. I am out of time. I appreciate all of you. I
    yield back.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, sir. I now recognize Mr. Nadler for 5
    minutes.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you.
        Ms. Abrams, as we have in numerous cases, challenging
    discriminatory voting laws since the Shelby County decision,
    litigation takes years to resolve and can cost millions of
    dollars to completion. Moreover, discrimination victims can
    initiate such litigation only after they have been harmed. Even
    while litigation is ongoing, States that continue to advance
    more restrictions on the right to vote.
        In a world that is effectively without a preclearance
    requirement, how has the cost and length of private litigation
    impacted the ability of civil rights groups to protect voters?
        Ms. Abrams. It is a crippling burden that has been placed
    on organizations that have to seek outside financial support in
    order to secure fundamentally guaranteed rights to vote. My
    organization, The New Georgia Project, which we founded in
    2014, had to pursue years of litigation to undo some of the
    challenges we discovered.
        As I mentioned earlier, the exact match process only came
    to light because of the 34,000 applications that were
    suspended. And under a settlement in 2016, 2 years after the
    initial election, Secretary Kemp then agreed to restore their
    right to vote. We had a 90-day rule, which created a blackout
    period during which thousands of applications to register to
    vote were not processed, which meant that at least 20,000 that
    we know of were held up until after the election. They were not
    timely processed because of an unwritten rule, that had
    preclearance been in effect, would have come to light.
        It took us 2\1/2\ years of litigation and discovery for us
    to discover this problem. And in 2017, 3 years after we
    uncovered this issue, they finally had a Federal court to
    essentially eliminate the ability to use this 90-day suspension
    rule.
        These are only two examples of what has hit organizations,
    is that they are being forced to combat massive State budgets
    that allow taxpayers to fund voter suppression until such time
    as those who are most vulnerable and most harmed can muster the
    resources to defend themselves and to restore the right to
    vote.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you.
        Ms. Aden, Mr. Hawkins argues that Congress must identify
    congruent and proportional constitutional violations.
    Specifically, that any State subjected to preclearance has
    engaged in rampant, widespread, recalcitrant discrimination so
    pervasive that it cannot be adequately addressed by judicial
    remedies, in order to constitutionally justify imposing
    substantial federalism costs for the preclearance requirement.
        He also asserts that based on current facts, Congress could
    not meet such a standard and, therefore, may exceed its
    authority under the 15th Amendment if we now impose a
    preclearance requirement. How would you respond to that?
        Ms. Aden. Thank you for that question. So I agree that
    Section 5 is meant to get at the whack a mole, the adaptive
    discrimination, but I do adamantly disagree that we have to
    demonstrate that conditions existed like they were in 1965 or
    before then, because Congress surmised with the evidence before
    it that discrimination is ingenious, that it morphs into the
    next bad thing.
        And I think it is important that we also talk and continue
    to look at Texas, because the record there is one of many that
    shows the pervasiveness of discrimination. The Fifth Circuit
    has ruled on the Texas voter ID law, and the merits of that
    case have been decided, so I am not going to continue to
    dispute that the Fifth Circuit has determined that the law was
    racially discriminatory.
        But then we can look to what, again, the legislature did
    with its redistricting plans. They had found 2011 Congressional
    and State House plans had been determined to be intentionally
    discriminatory, and I heard members of the commission say that
    is abhorrent, that intentional discrimination is abhorrent. We
    have seen abhorrent behavior in Texas. And if you look not just
    at its ID law, but if you look at the redistricting plans, you
    can look at the intentional discrimination found by a District
    Court in Pasadena where the Federal court has ordered that
    jurisdiction to be subject to bail in. You can see what Waller
    County has done, decade after decade, trying to discriminate
    against historically black students at Prairie View and AMU.
    You can see what the legislature tried to do this last session
    with S.B. 9 trying to put through an omnibus voter suppression
    bill. I mean, you can look at that one jurisdiction, and Ms.
    Abrams can talk in detail about Georgia, and we can look across
    the country, and that record exists.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you.
        Ms. Aden. Yes.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you. I have one more question----
        Ms. Aden. Yes.
        Chairman Nadler [continuing]. Before we run out of time.
        Should the Department of Justice, or perhaps the court, be
    granted, in a new Voting Rights Act jurisdiction, to
    retroactively invalidate an election and order a new election
    when it is proven that there was substantial discrimination
    that exceeds the margin of victory of a candidate?
        Ms. Aden. You know, before answering that directly,
    Congress is operating at the apex of its power by enforcing the
    14th and 15th Amendments. And what we saw during the Section 5,
    nearly 50 years of Section 5 operating, is that it was
    necessary on certain occasions to invalidate elections.
        In fact, the case that came to the Supreme Court in Shelby
    County was the result of white voters, someone mentioned
    annexations, annexing black voters out of a district. It went
    from being 80 percent black to under 30 percent black in a
    majority black district, and those annexations over time
    weren't precleared.
        Ultimately, the law required that an election be held under
    a fair electoral system. And so, I do think that that is more
    the exception than the rule, and that we need to think about
    going forward what mechanism do we have in place so that people
    don't have to marshal the resources to run into court.
        Congress should also look at strengthening the preliminary
    injunction standard, because that is another thing that makes
    it very difficult for the victims of discrimination to be able
    to stop discrimination before it happens. But to your question,
    I do think there are exceptional circumstances where redoing an
    election when there has been a racially discriminatory,
    abhorrent practice is something that can take place, but we
    need a mechanism where no election takes place under a racially
    discriminatory regime.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you. My time has expired. I yield
    back.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
        I now recognize Mr. Cline, the distinguished member from
    the far western part of Virginia.
        Mr. Cline. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the witnesses
    for being here.
        In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act to address
    deep-rooted racial discrimination in voting. The Voting Rights
    Act was the most significant statutory change since the
    Reconstruction period following the Civil War and the
    relationship between State governments and the Federal
    Government in terms of voting, and it was immediately
    challenged in the courts. Between 1965 and 1969, the Supreme
    Court issued several key decisions upholding the
    constitutionality of Section 5, and affirming the broad range
    of voting practices for which preclearance was required.
        Now we have the decision in Shelby where the court ruled
    Section 4(b) is unconstitutional because it covers formulas
    based on data over 40 years old, thereby making it no longer
    responsive to current needs and an impermissible burden on the
    constitutional principles of federalism that equals sovereignty
    of the States.
        The Supreme Court decision in Shelby is now considered a
    landmark case regarding the constitutionality of the Voting
    Rights Act, and with many questions remaining, I am happy to
    have this hearing to discuss the impact of Shelby. I would
    first--well, let me first ask Mr. Hawkins if there is anything
    he would like to respond to that was said.
        Mr. Hawkins. Thank you, Representative. Just a couple of
    things in response. My colleagues have referred to purposeful
    discrimination findings made by District Courts. Not a single
    one of them has survived appeal. In the voter ID case, for
    example, the court, the Fifth Circuit explicitly vacated and
    reversed the District Court's purposeful discrimination finding
    in that case. All other findings have met the same fates.
        As to the claim that Texas' behavior demonstrates a need
    for preclearance, I think the opposite is true. What we have
    seen in the redistricting case in the voting rights, or the
    voter ID case that we have been talking about today, is Texas
    has responded to that litigation by working to conform its laws
    to the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, and the
    requirements of the Constitution.
        As I discussed earlier, when Texas' voting rights--or
    excuse me--voter ID law was challenged, S.B. 14, rather than
    pursue another appeal to the Supreme Court following the en
    banc vote, Texas changed its law. Likewise, in the
    redistricting case, in redistricting litigation following the
    2010 Census, a Federal District Court ordered interim remedial
    redistricting plans into effect, because the legislatively
    enacted plans had not been precleared.
        Consistent with the Supreme Court's instructions in Perez
    v. Perry, the District Court conducted only a preliminary view
    of claims against the State's plans, but the court-ordered
    interim plans made extensive changes. The Texas legislature
    repealed its challenged plans and permanently adopted the
    court-ordered plans in its next session.
        So what we have seen in the case of Texas is a State
    conforming its laws to the requirements of the Constitution,
    the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court. That is a far cry
    from the landscape in 1965 when the covered jurisdictions were
    deliberately acting in bad faith to evade the review of the
    Supreme Court, forestall their compliance with the 15th
    Amendment, and suppress voters illegally.
        Mr. Cline. In fact, that is federalism at work, is it not,
    the States responding to the court's direction with affirmative
    legislative action?
        Mr. Hawkins. It is, Representative, and that is one of the
    Supreme Court's core themes in the Shelby County decision. The
    States created the Federal Government. In no other context do
    States have to run their laws by the Federal Government to get
    permission in advance of enforcing them.
        The preclearance regime that the Voting Rights Act created
    was the one exception to that general rule, and it was
    justified only by the extreme conditions on the ground in the
    south in the early 1960s. That is the core holding of the
    Supreme Court's Shelby County decision.
        Absent those extreme concerns, federalism and the co-equal
    sovereignty of the States does not allow Congress to impose
    that type of regime, and that is the core holding of Shelby
    County in 2013.
        Mr. Cline. In fact, laws such as regular maintenance of
    voter rolls and photo ID laws are commonplace among States at
    this point, correct?
        Mr. Hawkins. Absolutely, Representative. There is nothing
    unusual or noteworthy about a State auditing its voter rolls to
    ensure that only eligible voters are registered to vote. In
    fact, I have just seen in the news this week reports that
    California is looking at its own voter rolls to ensure that
    only eligible voters are registered.
        The coverage I have seen indicated that in Los Angeles
    County, there are far more registered voters than there are
    eligible voters, and I understand that jurisdiction is taking a
    look at that to figure out what is going on. States and
    counties do this all the time. They have an obligation to do so
    consistent with Federal law to ensure that only eligible voters
    are voting.
        Mr. Cline. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Cline.
        Mr. Raskin is recognized for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
        The States did not create the Union. We, the people,
    created the Union in the Constitution. That is what we fought
    the Civil War about. It was the claim of the confederacy that
    it was a handshake among the States, and Lincoln explicitly
    rejected that and said the people created the Union and the
    Constitution, and no State could opt out of it. No State could
    secede, so I think we settled that question a century and a
    half ago.
        Disenfranchisement used to be relatively simple. In the
    first century, the law simply said that African Americans
    couldn't vote. Before the Civil War, the States just made it
    plain that--then we had a Civil War. We passed the 13th and
    14th and 15th Amendments, which established that the States
    could not discriminate on the basis of race, and for a period,
    the Constitution worked. That was Reconstruction, and we had
    African Americans voting in huge numbers throughout the former
    confederacy and African Americans getting elected to high
    offices in the States and getting elected to this body.
        And then there was a savage assault on Reconstruction. Some
    of it was through violence led by the KKK, and the former
    confederates. But a long period of subtle, legal
    disenfranchisement began with literacy tests, poll taxes,
    grandfather clauses, white primaries, character exams. And the
    second Reconstruction, which was the modern civil rights
    movement, targeted all of those practices with the Voting
    Rights Act of 1965, and specifically, with Section 5, which Ms.
    Aden has elaborated so well here. It said before the States
    that engaged in massive disenfranchisement and extinguishment
    of people's political rights for decades could make changes to
    voting practices, they had to first go to the Department of
    Justice, or to the U.S. District Court for the District of
    Columbia. Because if we allow them to go ahead and impose
    another disenfranchising mechanism, and they finally get to
    court 6 months or 8 months or 12 months later, it is too late
    to do anything. It is meaningless. That is what Section 5 and
    the preclearance requirement is all about.
        Now, we are living in a period where there is an attack on
    the second Reconstruction, on the modern civil rights movement
    and the Voting Rights Act, and we got it from a gerrymandered
    conservative Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder,
    which basically decapitated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby
    County v. Holder.
        Now, Ms. Abrams, it is an honor to have you here before the
    House Judiciary Committee. I heard you mention a bunch of new
    techniques of disfranchisement, voter purges, 90-day blackout
    period, refusing to process voter registration, exact match
    process. Can you tell me quickly what are the one or two worst
    techniques that were used in Georgia that disfranchised the
    people of the State in the last election?
        Ms. Abrams. Certainly. Thank you for the question. Exact
    match, I think, is the most obvious and deliberate and the
    strongest proof point for the need for preclearance, because it
    was denied under preclearance and only existed because
    preclearance disappeared.
        Mr. Raskin. Will you explain just very briefly again what
    exact match is?
        Ms. Abrams. Exact match requires perfect data entry by
    government employees. When you submit your application, if
    there is a hyphen missing, if your last name is spelled with a
    space, and they decline to enter the space, your application
    can be rejected. And in Georgia's system, there is no notice to
    the applicant of what the problem is.
        So you receive this circular firing squad of receiving
    information that you have been rejected. You resubmit the
    information. Likely, the government employee resubmits it the
    way they typed it the first time, and you never know that the
    reason you were rejected was a typographical error.
        Mr. Raskin. Very good. Thank you very much. Let's see.
        Mr. Hawkins, let me come to you. Texas put out a voting
    advisory in January that alleged that as many as 95,000 non-
    citizens were on the Texas voter rolls. This advisory fell
    apart within days because it became clear that tens of
    thousands of people on the State's list were actually U.S.
    citizens and were wrongfully included on this list. The State
    pulled the advisory back in April in order to resolve multiple
    Federal lawsuits that were brought against it.
        Now, had Texas counties moved forward with removing people
    from the rolls based on this flawed advisory, Texas would have
    disenfranchised thousands of people, and yet, presumably, you
    would be here to say that that is not something that should
    have had to go through the preclearance process, and if it had
    happened, they could have sued later. What would you have said
    to the thousands of people who had been disenfranchised under
    that situation?
        Mr. Hawkins. Representative, thank you for bringing up that
    example. I would like to address the premise of that question.
    The bottom line is that not a single person had his voter
    registration cancelled, not a single----
        Mr. Raskin. Because of the lawsuits that were brought
    against it, right?
        Mr. Hawkins. Because Texas did the right thing. There was
    an error, a miscommunication between the Texas Department of
    Public Safety based on incorrect----
        Mr. Raskin. I guess that is the whole point here. Who
    should bear the burden of the errors of the State? Should it be
    the people of the State who are trying to vote, or should it be
    the government officials who should get their hands slapped in
    a preclearance investigation by the Department of Justice?
        Mr. Hawkins. Your Honor, I--or excuse me. Representative, I
    don't think----
        Mr. Raskin. That is fine.
        Mr. Hawkins. I don't think that the experience that you are
    referring to implicates that question. The Secretary of State
    does not have the power to remove individuals from the voting
    rolls. County officials are responsible for maintaining the
    voting rolls in each county, and those county officials may
    remove a voter from the voting rolls only after a number of
    safeguards have been satisfied, including post removal judicial
    review, which is very much a part of the process.
        Mr. Raskin. Well, let me ask you this.
        Mr. Cohen. Your time is over by a minute. Thank you, Mr.
    Raskin.
        Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Cohen. Do you have to leave for the airport?
        Mr. Hawkins. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I have got a flight back.
        Mr. Cohen. I am just going to ask you for the heck of it.
    What time is your--when does your flight leave?
        Mr. Hawkins. My flight leaves at, I believe, 5:50.
        Mr. Cohen. You can make it in plenty of time. I don't want
    to stop you. But Ms. Abrams' flight is at what, 5:15?
        Ms. Abrams. 5:40.
        Mr. Cohen. 5:40.
        Mr. Raskin. You guys can share a taxicab.
        Mr. Cohen. We have got three more people, which is 15
    minutes. Can you wait 15 minutes? You will make it, believe me.
    I leave in an hour, and I make it.
        Mr. Hawkins. Understood, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Cohen. All right. Let's go. 5 minutes on the nose. Ms.
    Garcia, you are on.
        Ms. Garcia. I will dispense with any preliminary remarks. I
    just want to dive into the comment you just made in response to
    my colleague, Mr. Raskin. I mean, I just am sitting here in
    disbelief that you are suggesting that Texas did the right
    thing in this whole purging order of these 95,000 registered
    voters. I mean, the Secretary of State's office and the
    Governor and it seems like everyone up in Austin was suggesting
    that this was not happening, that it was really, you know,
    something that they didn't mean to do. I mean, it took almost 5
    months, and the entire Senate not voting for the Secretary of
    State which he still did not get confirmed. And to have you sit
    here now and say that they were doing the right thing just as
    you are suggesting that Texas always is taking the lead, I am
    telling you. I was there sitting in the Texas Senate when we
    voted on the agreement on the Voting Rights Act--I mean, Voter
    ID. We were not taking the lead. I did not like some of it. I
    thought it wasn't good enough, but we were pretty much forced
    to do it because of the pending Federal court case.
        So I just want to clarify the record that some of the
    statements that you are making are, quite frankly, quite
    misleading, and I take offense to some of them and the
    characterizations that you have made.
        But having said that, because I said I was not going to
    make a preliminary remark, Texas is really almost the poster
    child for Voting Rights Act violations. I testified before the
    Senate Judiciary Committee back in 2014, and as I reflected on
    the testimony I presented there then, not much has changed.
    When I testified back in 2014, between 1982 and 2005, for
    example, Texas had earned 107 Section 5 objections to voting
    policy, second only in number to Mississippi; 97 concerned
    local laws and affected about 30 percent of Texas counties home
    to disproportionate share, nearly 72 percent of the State's
    non-voting population. And it is true, Ms. Aden. How many times
    have Federal courts found intentional intent discrimination? Is
    it seven, eight? I have lost track.
        Ms. Aden. Across five States, there are about 9 decisions
    of intentional discrimination since Shelby.
        Ms. Garcia. Since Shelby. And how many of those have been
    vacated completely, and not sent down for rehearing and another
    trial?
        Ms. Aden. I believe all of the nine across those five
    States are still standing decisions of intentional
    discrimination under the Constitution.
        Ms. Garcia. Right. They are still standing. Now, which one
    of our redistricting maps are we working under? Is it not true
    that most--we are still under the temporary maps because we are
    still in litigation since the last Census?
        Ms. Aden. So the two--there are decisions from after--
    decisions related to the 2011 maps that forced the interim
    plans that were, in large part, upheld by the Supreme Court,
    but those early decisions that led to the interim remedy, those
    were based upon findings, preliminary findings of intentional
    discrimination, and those have not been disturbed.
        When this case eventually made it to the Supreme Court,
    while an entire decade had passed and many elections had taken
    place, the Supreme Court upheld the discrimination in one
    district. So it is a very complicated posture, but our position
    is that there are intentional discrimination rulings from 2011.
    That is the basis for the bail in relief that advocates are
    still continuing to urge in District Courts in Texas. And Texas
    represents--it is the poster child, but there is also evidence
    from many other States that this body should examine that
    warrants Section 5 preclearance.
        Ms. Garcia. But the only one where we have a bail-in
    provision would be the Pasadena case which actually you said in
    my district, in working together with MALDEF, we were able to
    litigate that. In fact, I testified about Pasadena at the
    Senate Judiciary Committee in the Galveston County case. It
    just seems like a lot of that, because my district is 77
    percent Latino, and that is where a lot of stuff happens.
        Ms. Aden. And I would just correct you. That was the only
    court-ordered bail in Pasadena. Since Shelby, Allen Evergreen,
    Alabama, a court found intentional discrimination, and the
    parties agreed to bail-in, so there two jurisdictions that
    since Shelby have been subject to bail-in, but that is far
    insufficient.
        Ms. Garcia. I am almost losing my time here, but just one
    quick question. On this, Section 5 was meant to, as you said,
    to get to the harm before it starts. How much does this
    litigation cost? I mean, some of these cases go on 5, 6, 7
    years. Just ballpark figure. I know every case is different,
    but just generally speaking, how much do we have to spend on
    this?
        Ms. Aden. On average, hundreds of thousands of dollars, if
    not millions, and that includes not just challenges to
    statewide measures, but even suing one county can cost hundreds
    of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and that is both
    taxpayers' money to fight discrimination, and that is taxpayer
    money drawn by the discriminators to defend discrimination.
        Ms. Garcia. Thank you. And Mr. Chairman, I would like to
    ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the entire 20
    some pages----
        Mr. Cohen. Without objection, it will be done.
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        Mr. Cohen. Ms. Escobar for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Escobar. Chairman Cohen, thank you so much for holding
    this hearing, especially on this very important anniversary,
    and thanks to all of our panelists for being here. I am very
    grateful for your testimony.
        Although I will say I am shocked to hear the opinion that
    Texas has done the right thing when it comes to its voter
    suppression efforts, because we all know that the consequences
    to voter suppression completely change the outcome of elections
    and change the public's ability to have true representation in
    public office.
        Mr. Chairman, I would like to please enter into the record
    an article about my Governor, who is reportedly--emails show he
    is behind the effort to purge the voter rolls in Texas, an
    effort that many of us saw as a surreptitious way to change the
    outcome of elections, and to try to circumvent the changing
    demographics in our State.
        Mr. Cohen. Without objection, it will be done.
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        Ms. Escobar. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Ms. Abrams, you and I share the fact that we both come from
    a State that--States, Texas and Georgia, that were previously
    covered under the preclearance formula. In your testimony, you
    illustrate the challenges Georgia faces in a post Shelby world,
    and I see so many parallels between our two States, given the
    example that I just cited.
        Can you please expand on the voter roll purges in Georgia?
    What are some of the key lessons that you learned that you can
    share with us through your work with The New Georgia Project
    and Fair Fight Action? What can Texas learn from Georgia?
        Ms. Abrams. I am going to decline to answer that question,
    but I will answer the larger question. I would say, first of
    all, during the tenure of Secretary of State Brian Kemp, 1.4
    million voters were purged. In a single day in 2017, half a
    million voters were taken off the roll, a reduction of the
    Georgia rolls by 8 percent.
        Now, to the credit of the State, we have a version of
    automatic registration, which has added about 681,000 voters to
    the rolls, simply by signing up for their driver's license. The
    challenge is that a number of those people who are availing
    themselves of that were unlawfully purged during the 1.4
    million-person purge.
        The challenge is that in Georgia, we face not only
    malfeasance, but incompetence. There are people being removed
    from the rolls who should not be removed. There is no condition
    for their removal, but we have been able to demonstrate that
    the communication from the Secretary of State's office has been
    inadequate to the task.
        There has been a constant attempt to defer responsibility
    to the localities to say that it was the county's fault for not
    doing so, but the reality is the Secretary of State is the
    election superintendent. That is the person in charge. The buck
    stops with that person. And the challenge with the way voter
    purging happens is that no one is responsible, but voters are
    losing their rights.
        In the State of Georgia, there has been an argument that
    because we had the highest turnout record in Georgia for voter
    turnout in 2018, there could not have been voter suppression. I
    would argue that that is the moral equivalent of saying that
    because more people get in the water, there can't be sharks.
        The reality is that voter suppression is adapting to the
    changing demographics of our country, and the reality is that
    voter purging is one of the tools used. It may be an imperfect
    tool, because people will continue to seek their rights. They
    believe that they have the right to vote. I grew up with
    parents who instilled in me a respect for that right, and there
    are those who will aggressively and assiduously pursue it, but
    there are so many others, who when rejected by their State,
    when rejected by their government, they turn away, and they do
    not return.
        And that is what is so pernicious about voter suppression,
    that we have people who believe now that they have no voice
    because of error, because of intentionality, and because of
    racial discrimination. And those are challenges that not only
    affect Georgia, but they affect the rest of the country.
        One thing I will say is that I do believe that one of the
    opportunities we have here is to expand the coverage of Section
    5. I do believe that there is a broader need for Section 5 to
    not simply be afforded or to provide coverage to those States
    that have a history of bad action, because the reality is more
    States have joined the party. More States have decided that
    because they cannot win elections fairly if there is full
    participation, then the goal is to limit who can participate.
    And that is a fundamental flaw in the process, and it is
    dangerous to our democracy, and we have to recognize that voter
    suppression, while it may target voters of color, it will
    affect us all.
        Ms. Escobar. Thank you, Ms. Abrams.
        Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you so much for your courtesy.
        Ms. Jackson Lee is recognized for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. Let me thank the committee for holding
    this very important hearing, and for the record, I would like
    to put the following statement in.
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        Ms. Jackson Lee. Just after the purging of approximately
    98,000 individuals in the State of Texas, Solicitor General
    Hawkins, Republican officials were quick to claim that the
    Secretary of State's actions were further evidence of growing
    threat of widespread voter fraud. On January 25, 2019, the
    Texas Attorney General sent a tweet proclaiming voter fraud
    alert. The Secretary of State discovered approximately 95,000
    individuals--this is all a quote--identified by DPS as
    noncitizens having a matching voter registration record in
    Texas, approximately 58,000 of whom had voted in Texas
    elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.
    President Donald Trump tweeted 58,000 noncitizens voted in
    Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These
    numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country,
    especially in California voter fraud is rampant. Must be
    stopped. Strong voter ID.
        Ms. Abrams, first of all, thank you for the work that you
    are doing in your new leadership, and certainly everyone
    watched the numbers of purging that occurred in Georgia. We are
    stuck on that, because I think you made a point is that purging
    suppresses and oppresses the vote, and it creates an aura of
    fear which happened in my Congressional district.
        So would you expand on that, with the aura of fear of
    purging, and also the exaggeration or the tilt when national
    leadership takes up the position that voter fraud is rampant
    across the country?
        Ms. Abrams. Certainly. Thank you for the question,
    Congresswoman. I would say, first, that there is a legitimate
    purpose to maintaining effective voter rolls. There is a
    legitimate purpose to laws that allow for the cleaning of rolls
    for people who have passed way, for people who are no longer
    eligible to vote, for people who moved from the State, and I do
    not believe there is any well-intentioned person who would say
    that cleaning and maintaining the rolls is improper.
        But what we argue is that the approach that has been taken
    has been so egregious and so flawed and sometimes so directly
    intended to harm voters of color, that we have undermined the
    intention of actually maintaining access to the rolls.
        In the State of Georgia, as I pointed out, 1.4 million
    people were purged between 2010 and 2018. Half a million were
    purged in a single day in the State of Georgia. That should
    raise alarms for anyone, because the reality is when you show
    up to vote, and you are told that you cannot cast a ballot
    because you have been removed from the rolls, even though you
    know that you should not have been, you are now called upon to
    become your own attorney, to argue with who is likely a
    volunteer that you have the right to vote. And if you happen to
    be in one of those hypersuppressive communities, that ability
    may be quashed.
        Georgia relied on an historic number of provisional ballots
    in the 2018 election. That meant that people cast their votes,
    believing they were allowed to actually make a choice only to
    have those votes later thrown out, and we have found a
    disturbing number of people who were given provisional ballots
    not because they were not effectively registered but because of
    the malfeasance and incompetence of the Secretary of State's
    office.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you. Solicitor General Hawkins,
    would you not argue, or could you not support the fact that
    minority voters are disproportionately affected by purging, and
    as I listen to your argument about having prevailed in the
    appellate court, you are right. As a lawyer, I understand the
    chances you take, but it is well known that the Fifth Circuit
    has never been supportive of civil rights legislation through
    the ages, so it is nothing unusual that you would have
    prevailed.
        My question, again, to you is, do you not see the purpose
    of looking to, or the purpose of purging outside of what
    gubernatorial candidate Abrams indicated of cleaning the rolls
    that you have seen being utilized to purge minority voters,
    particularly in Texas?
        Mr. Hawkins. Thank you for the question, Representative.
    First, I am not familiar with the lay of the landscape in
    Georgia, and I am not familiar with----
        Ms. Jackson Lee. I am only asking you about Texas and the
    anecdote--not the anecdote but the statement that I read about
    the joy of purging 95,000 individuals through the Secretary of
    State's office in Texas.
        Mr. Hawkins. Representative, 95,000 individuals were not
    purged.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. Only after a lawsuit was filed.
        Mr. Hawkins. The Secretary of State does not have the power
    to remove anybody from the voter rolls.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. They sent the information to our local
    counties, and I can tell you, it created hysteria.
        Mr. Hawkins. And they may remove individuals from the voter
    rolls in counties only after a number of safeguards, including
    judicial review, have been surpassed. I think it is important
    to note that Texas----
        Ms. Jackson Lee. The chilling effect was already there.
        Mr. Hawkins. I am sorry, Representative?
        Ms. Jackson Lee. The chilling effect was already present.
        Can you answer about Section 5? Is there any reason for
    Section 5 not to be reimplemented?
        Mr. Hawkins. Yes. The Supreme Court's decision in Shelby
    County, which held that preclearance under the current
    landscape is unconstitutional.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. If Congress is to reinstitute it, would
    there be any reason not to have it reinstituted? I understand
    Shelby.
        Mr. Hawkins. The Congress should pass legislation that is
    constitutional. In fact, Congresspersons have sworn an oath to
    the Constitution of the United States.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. We intend to do that.
        Mr. Cohen. Our time is up. Our time is up.
        Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you. We intend to do that. Thank
    you.
        Mr. Cohen. Our time is up. Thank you.
        Mr. Collins wants to come. Is he here? He is. Mr. Gohmert.
    You would like to have questions? We want to get--they want to
    ask you questions. You know, it is up to you. He is from Texas,
    he is blah, blah, blah, and Ms. Abrams, you are free if you
    want to split.
        Mr. Nadler for a brief question, and then Mr. Gohmert.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you.
        I was intrigued by something that Ms. Abrams said a few
    minutes ago when she said that, if I understood you correctly,
    that history of discrimination is not sufficient--I don't mean
    that--is not the only thing, is not the only thing that should
    justify preclearance. What else, in your opinion, should
    justify preclearance?
        Ms. Abrams. What we have found, not only through the work I
    have done in Georgia, but through conversations with colleagues
    in other States is that what is currently happening is that as
    demographic changes occur, and there are increasing numbers of
    people of color who have the right to vote, we are seeing a
    concomitant increase in the hurdles that are being placed in
    front of them to diminish their opportunity to vote. That has
    been seen in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in North Carolina. Across the
    country, we have seen increases in the chilling effect on the
    access to the right to vote. And therefore, any restoration of
    Section 5 should, I believe, set a universal standard that
    disallows any processes that would diminish the ability for
    people of color to access the right to vote, based not only on
    historical precedent, but based on current operations and
    current activities.
        Chairman Nadler. Thank you very much.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you. And we have cabs for you all, and we
    will ask everybody to stay seated when we finish so they can
    get out and get to their cabs, and no pictures, no autographs.
    They have to make their cabs.
        Mr. Gohmert.
        Mr. Gohmert. Thank you. Mr. Hawkins, I know you are trying
    to catch a plane. Anything you need to respond to? I had some
    questions for you, and especially with regard to how Texas uses
    Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But anything based on what
    you have heard you want to add before you have to go?
        Mr. Hawkins. Thank you, Representative. I think it is
    important to underscore that Texas has a duty under State and
    Federal law to ensure that its voting rolls are accurate as
    does every other State. And, in fact, Texas has a compelling
    interest in ensuring that ineligible voters do not vote.
        Now, why is that so? It is because any time somebody votes
    unlawfully, that suppresses the vote of a lawful voter. And
    that is why we are seeing not just Texas, but many other the
    States, including just this week California, auditing voter
    rolls to ensure that only registered voters are--that only
    eligible voters are registered to vote. That is the purpose of
    auditing voter rolls, to ensure that the right to vote is
    protected because if somebody who is ineligible to vote votes,
    that suppresses the vote of a lawful citizen.
        Mr. Gohmert. I appreciate your efforts so much, and I would
    like to indicate for the record, and I won't have any further
    questions, Mr. Hawkins. I am told that you are trying to get
    away.
        But with regard to the need for this hearing and all, I
    think it is important to note the facts on the reauthorization
    of this. I was fairly new here in Congress, but it seemed very
    clear to me that since Section 4 had not been changed for about
    40 years, it was still penalizing States for sins, wrongs,
    decades before by fathers and grandfathers, so to speak. And
    so, I know Chairman Sensenbrenner was pushing hard. He didn't
    want changes. He was not open to my suggestions.
        But we looked at a map of areas where there was a very
    definite problem, a disparity in the numbers based on racial
    voting, and there were some problems around the country that
    were not included in the States that had to get Section 5
    clearance. And I had an amendment that would require any State
    that had a significant disparity in racial voting, they had to
    fall under Section 5.
        And let's update that, Section 4. Let's get a new standard
    in there. And Chairman Sensenbrenner said, Absolutely not. We
    are not changing it. And as I recall, there was a district in
    Wisconsin that had a significant disparity problem that might
    have fallen under Section 5. And Mr. Conyers was much more open
    to the idea of having an amendment that would require any
    district, any State in the country with a racial disparity
    problem would have brought them under Section 5.
        And I said most recently before the second time I talked to
    him, he was open to it. He said, you know, Louie, I have been
    talking to some of our experts, and they say Yeah, it is a
    risk. It might get struck down, so why don't we just go ahead
    and wait and see what happens? And I said I just talked to the
    previous dean of New York University Law School, and he said he
    sees a substantial chance that it will be struck down by the
    Supreme Court when it gets there. But the bill was done. They
    would not allow my amendment to be passed, and therefore, it
    would continue to punish only those who had engaged in
    wrongdoing decades before instead of bringing it current to
    make districts, States that were failing to have fairness
    racially have to answer under Section 5. And just as I
    predicted, just as others predicted, it got struck down, and we
    are still here without a modification that could have been done
    back in that reauthorization.
        So anyway, I am hoping that we will work things out. I am
    proud of the way Texas has been using Section 2 litigation to
    get this straight or get problems straightened out even without
    changes to Section 4, and I appreciate the chance to air these
    matters, and I yield back. Thank you very much.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you, sir.
        We have got two more people that want to ask questions. If
    either one of you want to leave, you are free to leave.
        Mr. Hawkins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have to take off.
        Mr. Cohen. You agreed to 15 minutes. You did it. Thank you
    so much for your testimony.
        Ms. Abrams, we have got people willing to take you to the
    cab and get you out of here.
        Ms. Abrams. I can stay.
        Mr. Cohen. Great. Thank you, sir.
        First, Ms. Dean, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Dean. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank all of the
    witnesses, those who had to leave and those for sharing your
    views and your expertise.
        As we know, this is an important subcommittee hearing. This
    is an important set of issues. Suffrage is as fundamental a
    right as any in our Constitution, and the right to vote lies at
    the very heart of our democracy, that delicate democracy.
    Benjamin Franklin famously noted that the Framers left us with
    a Republic, but only if we could keep it, and of course,
    central to keeping it is public participation in elections. A
    government of the people, by the people, for the people should
    mean all the people.
        And so I was interested--I apologize. I stepped out to go
    to another meeting, so if I am being redundant, I apologize. I
    hope I am not. I had terrific scouts here listening.
        One of the things I was interested in, under Section 5,
    jurisdictions were required to provide racial impact data to
    the Attorney General as part of the preclearance review
    process, including information on the anticipated effect on
    racial minority groups and also, where necessary, information
    on demographics, maps, annexations, election returns, language
    usage. Can you tell me, is that kind of data still being
    collected post Shelby?
        Ms. Abrams. I will defer to Ms. Aden.
        Ms. Dean. Ms. Aden.
        Ms. Aden. So you are absolutely correct that through the
    process, the burden was on jurisdictions to shine a light on
    what they were planning to change, and the burden was on them
    to show what was the impact. Was it going to lessen the ability
    of people of color, Native American, African American, Asian
    American, Latino to be able to participate? And as it stands,
    what H.R. 4 does and what we need is that notice again of the
    voting changes and the burden to show what the impact is to be
    placed on the jurisdictions seeking to implement that law.
        Ms. Dean. That is the other piece of it, and from anecdotal
    and your personal experience, the other piece is what you just
    said, shine a light on the proposed changes so the public was
    on notice. The public notice piece. And I assume that has now
    dropped away because we no longer have the Section 5
    preclearance.
        So it is not only shine a light before any changes, the
    education of voters, but then also collect the data after to
    see what the impact. So now as a result of Shelby, we are not
    doing either. Is that right?
        Ms. Abrams. Correct. Under Fair Fight Action, we filed
    Federal litigation, and among our proofs, we were able to
    demonstrate that due to the purging of voters and the patterns
    of purging and the number of people who were forced to cast
    provisional ballots because of the ineffectiveness and the
    malfeasance of that process, there is essentially a racial map
    of African American communities that were subject to casting
    provisional ballots which have to be remedied. And if you are a
    working person, you might get Tuesday off. There is no
    allocation in State law to give you Wednesday and Thursday to
    go back and fix something that should never have been broken.
        Ms. Dean. Right.
        Ms. Abrams. We also know that Georgia had an extraordinary
    number of poll closures. We had 214 polls close out of roughly
    3,000. Those are largely African American communities. And
    while those poll closures may have been permissible because of
    some nuance of law, what we found was that there was a
    disproportionate effect on communities of color, largely
    African American, particularly poor. If you do not own
    transportation, and there is no public transportation, the
    closure of a polling place that is 2 miles from your house now
    being moved to 10 miles from your house has not only a chilling
    effect on your right to vote, it absolutely negates your
    ability to cast that vote.
        Ms. Dean. I couldn't say it any more eloquently than that.
    I come from a previous experience in the Pennsylvania
    legislature, pre-Shelby. Before I had gotten there in 2011, I
    guess, or early 2012, Pennsylvania passed a voter ID law which
    was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional, but I was a
    brand new State representative trying to help people navigate
    the world of what am I going to do if I need some sort of
    specified identification. We know exactly what that was
    intended to do.
        And I will close with this notion because I wasn't here.
    Sometimes I think witnesses have something they wish they could
    have been asked, and they didn't get the chance to say it, so
    may I ask you, Ms. Abrams, is there something more that you
    wanted to say, and the same to you, Ms. Aden.
        Ms. Abrams. I do think, and I want to reiterate this false
    connection that is being drawn between voter turnout rates
    among communities of color, and voter suppression. These are
    not correlated. One can have intentional laws and practices to
    discriminate against voters and have a concomitant effort by
    communities that care about these issues to push back and to
    provide access. I am a part of a long legacy of people who have
    responded to oppression by making certain that we overreact,
    and that we overperform, but we cannot ignore the fact that
    that discrimination still exists. Discrimination doesn't cease
    to exist simply because there are those who are willing to
    fight back. That fighting back should demonstrate how important
    it is to eliminate the discrimination on its face.
        Ms. Dean. Thank you, Ms. Aden.
        Ms. Aden. And I just want to correct that. The reason why
    we focus on Texas is because we love Texas. In fact, we love
    the voters of Texas. We want people to participate. So I don't
    want today to be a show just about Texas or just about Georgia.
    As Ms. Abrams said, Congress can and must hold hearings and
    look at the landscape of voter suppression across the country.
    Look at what is happening to Native American voters in North
    Dakota, where they are required to have an address on their
    photo ID, even though many live on reservations and do not have
    that. Look at Kansas where one polling place was left open, and
    it was out of town, and there is no public transportation. Look
    at Wisconsin, which has been invoked. Look across the country.
    And it cannot be the case that we are happy with the way that
    elections are taking place in our country. It is unacceptable.
    And it is because we love the people who want to participate
    that is incumbent upon us to work to fix the problem.
        Mr. Cohen. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Dean. Now we
    recognize Mr. Collins.
        Mr. Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Ms. Abrams, and one of the things that is good about this,
    and I am glad you are here. In 2011, back in a different time
    in a different world for both of us, you voted in favor of a
    bill to reduce early voting period to 3 weeks and add a
    Saturday, correct?
        Ms. Abrams. Correct.
        Mr. Collins. House Bill 92. I will enter that into the
    record. It has been stated earlier by the chairman of this
    committee----
        Mr. Cohen. Without objection.
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        Mr. Collins. Thank you [continuing]. By the chairman of
    this committee that restricting early voting has actually had a
    disproportionate impact on minority voters. I know that was
    very much a concern for you at the time, and you and
    Representative Mark Hamilton had those conversations, and it
    was showed that there was either no difference in
    participation, or actually, there was at least a benefit to
    minority voters at that time. Would you agree with that
    statement?
        Ms. Abrams. I would agree, but I believe it is important to
    clarify. Georgia at the time had an outsized number of early
    voting days, 45 early voting days. The national standard, the
    gold standard was 21 days. Therefore, what Georgia did by
    reducing from 45 to 21 days was to come into conformity with
    the most appreciated and the most accepted role for early
    voting.
        Mr. Collins. Exactly.
        Ms. Abrams. However, since that time, there were multiple
    opportunities, multiple attempts made in the Georgia general
    assembly to actually restrict from 21 to 7 days, and I
    vigorously opposed every one of those bills and fought them
    back.
        Mr. Collins. Reclaiming my time. I was not there. We were
    there on this one, and I think the interesting issue was is the
    point that I am making is that when you do carefully calculate,
    it was to the norm. There was not a discriminal threat, and the
    statements of broad impact can't be used all the time because
    it leads to bad decisions when you blanketly say something
    affects in a disproportionate way.
        You just admitted, I just saw, and we had the bill pass.
    But in that 3-week period which was part of what was actually
    said by our chairman, it did not do that. A 7-day, we could
    probably agree on, but in that part, it did not. So you can't
    blanketly say bringing back early voting does that.
        Another issue that has that has come to mind, and I have a
    question. I am glad you said it and a previous witness. You
    said there are reasons to keep a voter roll accurate. The
    question, though, as you come into this process, you stated
    something earlier about exact match that I am not sure we
    actually--I want to make sure that we are clear on. And this is
    a couple yes-nos. 1.4 million were purged. You say that. It is
    in your written testimony. Do you believe all of those were
    purged for wrong reasons? Yes or no?
        Ms. Abrams. Of course not.
        Mr. Collins. Okay. Let's look at that. The question you
    also said among the exact match and the 53,000 voter
    registrations we will use as you put in your thing was held
    hostage. The question has--and you said it is because of
    government bureaucrats or government workers who mistakenly put
    information in, and that is the only reason you have given that
    these exact match doesn't work. Is it not true that, however,
    the person who is actually inputting information has to have
    accurate information to put in so that it is accurate? Would
    that be a fair statement?
        Ms. Abrams. I do not believe that fairly characterizes
    the----
        Mr. Collins. So you do not believe that a statement,
    something that is given--if I put a--filled out a form and it
    was half filled out, or I did not put my last name, or I did
    not put my date of birth, or I did not put an exact--I did not
    put an address, is that a form that can be actually used by a
    local voter registrar to actually fill out a form that would do
    an exact match? Yes or no?
        Ms. Abrams. Sir, it is impossible to provide a yes-or-no
    answer to that question, because the exact match is not simply
    the question of what was put on the form. The challenge with
    exact match is not the entry on the form. It is the database
    that is then used to verify the access to this information. And
    so absent the second part of the process, it is an
    impossibility to give a truthful answer to the question
    presented.
        Mr. Collins. But the truth--and you are still as good as I
    remember you. The issue is here, though, is not this. If it is
    not right for the exact match, to match what they need to match
    for verification process, if I turned it in, still did not
    match it up, it was my input on the form or the person
    collecting or the group collecting this that did not turn in a
    form that a person in the voter registration office could
    actually use to do exact match, not what they were matching to.
    But if I did not give them proper match, then that is the
    problem. There has at least got to be the understanding it is
    not just a government data input problem, and we are not
    throwing all voter registration people under the bus with this.
    I think that is the problem that I have in your answer, because
    it implies a governmental problem, which also goes back to a
    bigger issue that I have here, and that is the implication that
    Brian Kemp, the Governor of the State of Georgia, is the person
    behind all of the problems here.
        And this has become a bigger question for the State that
    you and I love. When you had a former presidential or a
    presidential--a current presidential candidate come to Georgia
    and make a statement in your defense and basically said that
    Stacey Abrams will be Governor of Georgia if Georgia wasn't
    racist. I don't think that is what you want Georgia to be
    looked at, and I don't think that is what I wanted, and I have
    actually talked to this individual. The question is making sure
    we have accurate voter rolls, even by your group's
    administration, making sure that our accurate voter rolls are
    there, and that people have a possibility of doing that.
        The question, though--one last question that I have in
    here, and we could go on, but I know you have got a flight, and
    I will see you again, hopefully under different circumstances,
    but one question bugged me from the whole time I watched it.
    There was a clip, and you said it even afterwards. When we are
    talking about our voter rolls being there for every person,
    every citizen, do you believe that non-citizens should vote in
    the State of Georgia?
        Ms. Abrams. No, and I have never said that non-citizens
    should be allowed to vote.
        Mr. Collins. What did you say, by the way?
        Ms. Abrams. What I said was that the blue wave which was
    not a reference to the right to vote, but a reference to the
    resistance of this administration's policies that have
    disenfranchised, dehumanized, and harmed the ability for people
    of the United States of America to fully exercise their rights
    and freedoms, that the change that would come, which is
    euphemistically referred to as the blue wave would be achieved
    by people who are both documented and undocumented. That did
    not refer to, and in fact, it has been proven through
    Politifact analysis I never once called for anyone who is not
    legally eligible to vote to be able to do so. And I would refer
    you to our long tenure together, where I worked with Democrats
    and Republicans to always ensure the integrity of the right to
    vote. It has been my practice as an adult since my time in
    college.
        And with due respect, the reality is that we as a Nation
    stand as an emblem of what democracy can mean, and that is
    diminished when there are irregularities, when there are
    malfeasance and misfeasance activities that undermine the right
    to vote. And that is what I have called attention to, and that
    is the work that I am doing.
        Mr. Collins. And that is exactly what the problem is, is
    when we have the far--even from groups taping----
        Mr. Cohen. Our time is up. Thank you, Mr. Collins.
        I appreciate the panelists coming and your testimony. We
    will have 5 days for members to come up with questions, and
    they can submit them in writing, and we would ask you to answer
    them.
        And with that, the hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 4:53 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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                                    APPENDIX

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