The law also requires jurisdictions to pre-clear laws and procedures if more than 5 percent of the population isn’t fluent in English. But Horne noted that the method the U.S. Department of Justice uses to determine that is a person’s heritage, not whether he or she can actually speak English. Arizona’s rate by the latter is less than 2 percent, Horne said. “In the case of Arizona, it absolutely makes no sense to have preclearance any longer.” In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, Horne wrote that “costs associated with Section 5 have only continued to increase while the statute’s benefits have all but vanished.” As a result, it said, affected states “spend millions of dollars and thousands of attorney hours to preclear an ever-expanding array of laws.” More on the upcoming challenge to Section 5 here.
Since the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act took effect nearly 50 years ago, the state began offering bilingual ballots, negating one of the reasons the state was originally put under review, Horne said.