Beyond the Voting Bill

In his very strong speech on voting rights, President Johnson made his point simply. "Every American citizen," he said, "must have an equal right to vote." But the bill he sent Capitol Hill two days later amended the passage to sound something like "every citizen of a state or county which has a literacy test, and which had a voting rate of less than 50 per cent in the last Presidential election, and which is unable to obtain a judgment in court that it has not discriminated in registering voters during the last ten years, has an equal right to vote."

There are too many qualifications in the President's bill. It affects only states which demand literacy tests of their voters, and therefore ignores discrimination in states like Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee, which have no test. The 50 per cent provision eliminates the state of North Carolina 51.8 per cent of whose eligible citizens voted in November (though 31 of the state's 100 counties would come under the provisions of the bill,). Only six Southern states and Alaska would be affected, and some of these may be able to obtain a court judgment declaring them exempt from the provisions of the act.

The bill should be strengthened. Rep. Gerald Ford has proposed that federal registrars be sent into any state if a court finds that 25 of its citizens have been denied on racial grounds the right to vote. Senator Paul Douglas and Clifford Case have suggested that the bill be made to apply to any county in which fewer than 25 percent of the eligible Negro citizens are registered.

But the Congress ought to go even further than these proposals; after passing the voting bill, it ought to enact a statute or a Constitutional amendment making a minimum age, a minimum length of residence, and mental competence the only qualification a state can impose on its voters.

The effect of this would be to outlaw literacy tests, poll taxes (which are still retained for State and local elections in five states) and a few other vestigial qualifications such as Vermont's freeman's oath.

Unlike the President's bill, such an amendment would meet the question of discrimination outside the South. In New York State it would, for instance, eliminate a test that requires voters to read and write English, thus denying the vote to thousands of Spanish-speaking citizens of Puerto Rican birth.

There have been two traditional arguments is favor of literacy tests first, that anyone unable to read will not have access to information about elections, and second, that the test induces illiterates to learn to read and write. The first argument is inapplicable today, when 90.8 per cent of American homes are equipped with television sets and 91.5 per cent with radios. Nor does the second argument have any validity; a vote is not candy to be awarded for education or any other attainment, but a citizen's right.

The last-resort argument, that all illiterates are incapable of reasoning, would be self-defeating even if it were accurate. If the advocates of literacy tests argue that reasoning cower should be the basis of the right to vote, they must explain why a less haphazard system--I.Q. tests, say--should not supersede their simple tests.

But we advocate no such system. There is no group of men that can be trusted to reason perfectly. Until one such appears, we prefer to take our chances with a complete democracy.