The Chamorro-native-controlled government of Guam is actively excluding the non-Chamorro U.S. citizens on the island from voting in an upcoming referendum on the island’s future. Non-native citizens — Filipinos, other Asians, whites, and blacks — are even prohibited from registering to vote for the election, although they make up 63 percent of the island’s 155,000 residents.
The restriction is defended by Guam as being non-racial because it restricts the vote to “native inhabitants” who lived in Guam in 1950 and their direct descendants.
But the Supreme Court has frequently struck down such sly attempts to restrict voting rights. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Court rejected Oklahoma’s attempt to close voter-registration rolls by saying that the Fifteenth Amendment nullifies “sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.” In 2000, in Rice v. Cayetano, the Supreme Court struck down a law that allowed only native Hawaiians to vote on who should run the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The court opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy stated: “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are, by their very nature, odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965, barring discrimination in voting, is also in full effect in Guam.
And nary a peep from AG Holder about "disenfranchising" citizens.The challenge to Guam’s law was brought by Dave Davis, a retired Air Force major who has lived in Guam for 35 years. When he tried to register to participate in the referendum, his application was rejected and stamped “void” by the Election Commission. Davis said he was particularly offended because the form required him to certify his racial background under penalty of perjury. Lawyers from the stateside Election Law Center and the Center for Individual Rights helped Davis file a class-action suit alleging racial discrimination. He acted only after Holder’s Justice Department refused to do anything about the matter. Davis told the local Rotary Club that he filed his lawsuit “to dispel the notion that some American citizens are more qualified to vote on public issues than others.”
Justice’s indifference to his complaint is striking given that Guam’s law is even worse than many of the odious Jim Crow statutes that limited voting in the South. “Even under Jim Crow, some blacks successfully registered to vote after they navigated the nasty maze of character exams and shifting office hours,” says former DOJ civil-rights attorney Christian Adams, who is representing Major Davis.
