Chairman and members of the committee. I do not know how many of the Members were surprised. as I wasand I know that a number of us were because of my discussions on the floorto find that. whereas this is basically a bill to extend the Voting Rights Act for 10 years. it contains a provision to ban. all voter qualification tests and devices forever. not just for 10 years. This ban in the bill is permanent. "Test or device" is defined in the act to include several things. among which are the following: A test to "demonstrate the ability to read. write. understand or CXXI- 1058Part 13 interpret any matter". second. to "demonstrate any educational achievement or knowledge of any particular subject." In other words. "test or device" goes far beyond a literacy test. to ban would prohibit any type of qualification that a person understand or have knowledge of anything whatsoever. And this bill would prohibit that for all States forever. In 1965. when this legislation was originally enacted. we targeted several States and counties and suspended these tests or devices in those States. Certainly argument could be made that that was relevant. because none of us could deny that these things were used for racial discrimination. In 1970. when we amended this act. we then applied the ban to all States. I was not here then. but I still wonder how it was that it could be argued that the ban had to be applied to every State. because certainly there were some States in this Union that had never used a literacy test for any type of discrimination. Mr. Chairman. all this amendment does is to take this provision which bans tests and parallel it in time with the other provisions which will expire in 10 years.
Keywords matched
literacy test