Act encourages voting bias

Re “21st century voting rights,” editorial, Jan. 17

The Times argues that the Supreme Court should uphold the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because “there’s still voting discrimination.”

No one denies that discrimination does and probably always will exist to some degree, but the challenge to the act is based on the fact that it singles out jurisdictions that no longer have a worse record of discrimination than others in the country, and that it bans actions by those jurisdictions that the court has made clear are not in violation of the anti-discrimination provisions of the Constitution.

Your editorial also ignores the fact that Section 5 actually encourages discrimination of a particularly pernicious variety, namely the segregation of voters by districts through racial gerrymandering.

This segregation turns the ideals of the Voting Rights Act on their head and has all kinds of noxious side-effects, such as discouraging interracial coalition building and encouraging identity politics of the most divisive and polarizing sort.

Roger Clegg

Falls Church, Va.

The writer is president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity.