This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 23rd 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has taken on voting rights more directly in recent years.

Abigail Thernstrom, Vice Chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and

author of the new book Voting Rights and Wrongs.

The elusive quest for racially fair elections spoke at the Cato Institute July 9th.

What jumps out at you in the Supreme Court's recent decisions on voting rights cases?

Well, the big decision is the most recent one involving a Northwest Austin utility

district and the decision, the case is normally referred to as Namudno because it's got

such a long name but and this is a case that involved a tiny little dinky water district basically

that sued the US government so it's versus Holder.

It started out as versus McKasey,

it became Holder eventually.

That has never discriminated against anybody. The district

wasn't even formed until the late 1980s. It's doesn't racially gerrymandering any districts because it doesn't have any

sub-districts to racially gerrymander.

So the big issue with respect to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act

was really off the table. It's not even relevant to this district. But it basically said, but it's because it's in Texas, all of Texas is what's called covered by the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which means that every sub-jurisdiction, every political

unit in the state of Texas has to submit any voting change for pre-approval by the Justice Department.

It, and the burden of proof is on the jurisdiction to show that it wasn't discriminatory in the voting change

it is proposing to make. This tiny little utility district said in effect why us I mean what justifies are having to go and beg the federal government for approval for a change we want to make and the change they

had submitted for preclearance was simply moving a polling place from a residence to a school.

So schools obviously has more accessibility than a residence does. And I mean the Justice Department didn't object.

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