During the debates that comprised the hearings for the voting rights bills, H.R. 6400 and S.1564, some congress-people found this part of the bills to be weak. By requiring 50% of the total population of the county to be registered and voting, the bill was limited to covering those areas that had fairly large populations of minorities that would affect the percentage of the entire population. As Representative Schweiker argued, areas that had small numbers of individuals who were discriminated against and were not allowed to vote were not helped by the bill (Hearings 1965: 714). Also, Representative Cramer argued that the combined requirement that the states affected utilize literacy tests or other "devices" left out minorities in states that did not have such obvious discriminatory practices, but which had small percentages of their minority populations registered and voting (Hearings 1965: 78).

Representative Cramer also questioned whether the data that the Census gathered to assess the 50 percentiles were reliable. He claimed that, in some areas, large swatches of the minority population is left out of the Census due to their locations, employments, or other social boundaries such as speech and discrimination from census-takers. Cramer suggested that a departure from percentages and a requirement that only 20 citizens complain that they cannot vote because of discrimination would be sufficient for a Federal examiner to be assigned to an area (Hearings 1965).