here is link to press release,the filing cites four claims, summarized here:
- The 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act is facially unconstitutional. It exceeds Congress’s authority under the 14th and 15th Amendments because it suspends all changes to state election law – however innocuous – until preclearance is given by the federal government. There is no rational relationship to the powers given to the federal government in the constitution.
- The formula for determining which states should be covered jurisdictions, found in Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, is unconstitutional. It places enforcement burdens on Arizona for problems that have been corrected for decades. For example, Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bi-lingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections.
- The Voting Rights Act is facially unconstitutional because it treats states within the union differently without a rational justification. For example, the “language minority” coverage formula unconstitutionally differentiates between states by applying three different standards for “Spanish heritage” to three different groups of states.
- In the alternative, the provisions are unconstitutional as applied to Arizona
In 1975, Arizona would not have been a covered jurisdiction if the Census Bureau had applied the definition of Spanish heritage it applied to New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, to Arizona. Just because a person claims that Spanish is his mother tongue does not mean that he cannot speak or read English or that he suffers from discrimination, but the Act treats him that way. The same is true of those with a Spanish surname. There is no basis to claim that a person with a Hispanic surname cannot read or speak English or suffers from discrimination.
The entire classification system is flawed, arbitrary, and irrational. No explanation was given as to why persons with a “Spanish surname” (but who did not speak Spanish as their native language) would encounter discrimination in Denver but not Las Vegas or Orlando; why a person who did not speak Spanish but had one Puerto Rican parent would face discrimination in Erie but not Stamford or Chicago; or why persons who spoke Spanish as their native language and did not have “Puerto Rican birth or parentage” faced discrimination only in the forty-seven states not in New Jersey, New York, or Pennsylvania. Yet, there are all results of the Act and its application.
The definitions of “Spanish language” and “Puerto Rican birth or parentage” included white English speakers raised in the United States within the calculation of “language minorities” if they married a native Spanish speaker or were born to vacationers in Puerto Rico. As such, a white English speaker would be classified as a “language minority” upon marriage to a Spanish speaker in Baltimore but not when the couple moved to Atlantic City, and a non-Hispanic English speaker born to vacationers in Puerto Rico would be classified as a “language minority” while residing in Pittsburg but not upon moving to Cleveland.