In so many ways, the right to vote is under national attack by conservatives today. This is seen most blatantly at the moment with respect to both the reauthorization and implementation of the Voting Rights Act.

Certain provisions of the act are due to expire in 2007 and must be reauthorized to remain in effect, including Section 5, which requires the Department of Justice to “pre-clear” changes to election procedures before a jurisdiction with a history of discrimination implements them, and Section 203, which requires elections officials in jurisdictions with large numbers of language minorities to provide election materials in the appropriate alternative languages.

Right wingers are arguing (amazingly) at congressional hearings and elsewhere that racial and language discrimination in voting is no longer a big problem in this country, and therefore the act should be left to die. The recent series of hearings conducted across the country by the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act, the scandals of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and the cases the DOJ itself has pursued make it all too clear, that, to the contrary, the need for the Voting Rights Act is unfortunately alive and well.

With respect to implementation—or really failure to implement—the act in an appropriate matter, the Washington Post this week alarmingly reported the way partisanship drove the decision to override the determination of career Justice Department attorneys that Georgia’s draconian voter identification law should not be “pre-cleared” under the terms of the Voting Rights Act. because the state had not proven it would not have a disproportionate impact on minority voting rights. This media bombshell was compounded by the subsequent revelation in the leaked DOJ memos that the chief sponsor of Georgia’s voter identification law told the Justice Department that if black people in her district “are not paid to vote, they don’t go to the polls,” and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, it is only because it would end such voting fraud.

Instead of being sidetracked by attacks on the act, we should consider some ideas that have been put forward by various scholars and experts that would actually strengthen it.

The most novel among them is one that takes direct aim at the problem of partisanship in the Department of Justice. Daniel Tokaji, of the law school at Ohio State University, makes the argument that if the DOJ cannot be trusted with Section 5, we should consider providing “affected voters with a private right of action, when they believe that DOJ has wrongly precleared an electoral practice. . . In the case of Georgia’s recent ID law, for example, DOJ precleared this law finding (with little evidence) that it wouldn’t have a retrogressive effect on African-American voters. In order to guard against partisanship by DOJ, those voters might be given a right to challenge such preclearance decisions in court. This would effectively put the evidentiary burden on DOJ, to make a showing that Georgia’s law doesn’t make black voters worse off.”

Another important question is whether we need to bring more language minority voters within the scope of Section 203. As our country becomes increasingly diverse, and ethnic populations more dispersed, this is a serious issue. Under the current law, in order to be subject to Section 203’s requirements, a jurisdiction must provide bilingual ballots and election materials if more than 5 percent of the voting age population or at least 10,000 citizens fall into a certain language minority group. The illiteracy rate of the minority group must also be higher than the national average.

Margaret Fung, head of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, believes we ought to reduce the numerical benchmark to 7,500. Fung points out that, “The current formula of section 203 still excludes a large sector of the Southeast Asian community, which includes Americans from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. . . In AALDEF’s 2004 multilingual exit poll of 654 Southeast Asian Americans, we found that 47% of Southeast Asian Americans said they were limited English proficient, and over one-third of all respondents needed some form of language assistance in order to vote. The effect of lowering the numerical trigger to 7,500 would be to remove language barriers for at least 77,955 limited English proficient Asian American citizens eligible to vote. This increase of 9 jurisdictions would affect counties in California, Illinois, New York, and Washington, in which all but one county are already mandated to provide voting assistance in one or more Asian languages.”

Finally, voting rights advocates argue that the reauthorized law should reverse a highly flawed decision issued in 2000 by the Supreme Court. The decision said that a covered jurisdiction could enact a voting change that had a racially discriminatory purpose as long as it did not have “retrogressive” impacts—that is, it turns to not actually put minorities in a worse position, despite what its proponents might have desired. As Mark Posner testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, the decision, “in very real terms, significantly shrank the remedial power of Section 5 by eliminating the most common basis on which the Justice Department was interposing objections.”

The immediate and most pressing task for those who believe in equal access to voting is to ensure effective congressional reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act by debunking those who argue that there is no longer any significant discrimination in the voting process in the United States, or that anyone who is in this country ought to have to know English, or else maybe we don’t want them voting anyway. For the future, it is worth discussing meritorious ideas such as these that would take the Voting Rights Act into the twenty-first century reality.

Tova Andrea Wang is senior program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.