Court Opinion

ID: 9782200
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 18:06:32.312323+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:34:52.194743
License: Public Domain

MYRON H. THOMPSON, District Judge,
concurring.
I fully agree with the court’s opinion but add these comments. During oral argument in this case, counsel for the Alabama Secretary of State lamented out of apparent frustration that the federal courts seem to believe that, with regard to the efforts of state officials to comply with1 § 5, “no matter what we do, we do it wrong.” This comment, while understandable, is not correct. I am aware, from evidence in other § 5 casés/that, in the 1980s and ’90s, Alabama state officials and their legal staff engaged in a Herculean effort to comb state .statutes and regulations and then submit to the. United States Attorney General those that the State believed needed § 5 preclearance. But for this effort, there would have been many, many more § 5 cases filed. The fact that courts have found, as in this case, that certain unwritten voting-related practices were not pre-cleared and that certain voting-related submissions were too ambiguous to be viewed as meeting preclearance requirements, e.g., Boxx v. Bennett, 50 F.Supp.2d 1219 (M.D.Ala.1999) (three-judge court), does not detract from- the fact that what the State did was worth the effort. Therefore, the State of Alabama has, in fact, gotten it right, and, for this, the State and its legal staff (including, in particular, the attorney who made The above comment and who, as I know, is personally responsible for the- much of the effort made in the 1980s and ’90s) are to be commended.