The Voting Rights Act
The 1945 Voting Rights Act, the first strong voting rights legislation since the Reconstruction Era, had two focuses. The first was to eliminate racial discrimination in voting registration, which had persisted despite the 1925 Act. The second was to combat fraud, abuse, and underhanded electoral tactics in general against political opposition.
Provisions of the 1945 Voting Rights Act:
- Standardization of voter registration procedures across all 50 states and DC - with federal supervision to ensure compliance and no racial bias
- Outlawing malapportionment
- Forbidding states from drawing electoral districts to divide and neutralize minority voters
- Restrictions on gerrymandering through adding additional compactness tests
- Outlawing tests being required for voting registration or voting other than proof of citizenship and residence
- Requiring states and other jurisdictions found under Dewey's report to have engaged in abuses of the electoral procedure to have future laws affecting their elections approved by the Justice Department
- Requiring election materials to be available in common minority languages
- Set limits to state ballot access requirements
- Enforcing ballot secrecy, registration and primary voting secrecy
- Forbidding employers from firing people based on their political party registration or donations
- Campaign finance transparency
- Putting limits on state campaign finance laws
- Provisions limiting government officials ability to campaign
- Anti-voter intimidation provisions
The Commonwealth Party had voted entirely against the bill, and its effects soon made it clear why. Mass voter registration of African-Americans began across the South, with the racial majorities of registered voters in numerous districts changing in a matter of months. Meanwhile, the tactics used by the Commonwealthers to prevent opposition parties from organizing well were also destroyed. Insanely restrictive ballot access laws, campaign finance laws forcing candidates to rely on public funds controlled by the Commonwealth Party's governments, and various voter intimidation methods were stopped. With campaign finances laid bare, and with public officials now being more limited in how they could advocate in their official capacity, the Commonwealth machine built over the past decade suddenly found itself without any of the tools it relied upon for success.
While the American Party had almost no support among black voters, most American Party leaders, even Southern ones who had officially opposed the bill, were privately happy that the Act had passed, as many of the provisions protected their supporters and campaigns. Furthermore, they hoped to exploit dissatisfaction among White Southerners who felt that the Commonwealth Party had failed them. Republicans were overall in favor of the bill; concerns about the size of the federal government and power of the Justice Department, which had led many to oppose LaGuardia's efforts in civil rights, suddenly disappeared when a Republican was in charge of the executive branch. Throughout the heavily black areas of the South, the Republican, Progressive, and Socialist Parties tended to run fusion candidates on anti-Commonwealth tickets.
The Supreme Court also helped with the democratization of the Southern United States by ruling against the Commonwealth state governments in a series of court cases brought against them by newspapers that felt they were facing biased enforcement of regulations and other forms of discrimination due to not supporting the Commonwealth line. The Commonwealth's power over the media in their states was crippled. The Supreme Court wasn't entirely on the path of reform in the lead-up to the 1946 midterms, however. When the Rhode Island state legislature tried to abolish districts for their lower house and move onto a proportional representation system, the court ruled that the 24th Amendment prevented proportional representation, as it stated that parties were given the ability to cross-endorse candidates of their choice which would not work in a proportional system.