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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in American history.
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965, it was designed to give teeth to the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise that voting rights could not be denied based on race—a promise that had been systematically undermined for nearly a century.
Today, this landmark law finds itself under unprecedented assault. After decades of bipartisan support and repeated renewals, the Act’s core protections have been gutted by Supreme Court decisions, triggering a new wave of voting restrictions across the country.
The result is a legal and political battlefield that would have been unimaginable to the civil rights leaders who bled for these protections on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
The Century of Denial
The Voting Rights Act emerged from a specific historical reality: the near-total exclusion of African Americans from the electoral process across much of the South. This exclusion wasn’t accidental—it was the product of a carefully constructed legal and social system designed to preserve white political supremacy.
The Fifteenth Amendment’s Broken Promise
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, declared that voting rights could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, this promise briefly became reality. African American men not only voted but won election to local, state, and federal offices, including Senators Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce of Mississippi.
This progress proved tragically short-lived. When federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, marking the end of Reconstruction, the federal government largely abandoned civil rights enforcement. Former Confederate states seized the opportunity to construct an elaborate system aimed at reestablishing white supremacy and stripping African Americans of their newly won rights.
The Jim Crow Architecture of Suppression
The system that emerged became known as “Jim Crow”—a web of state and local laws designed to segregate and disenfranchise Black Americans. This wasn’t a collection of isolated practices but a deeply interwoven architecture of suppression. When one tool was challenged or proven ineffective, another was readily available to take its place.
Poll Taxes: States imposed fees that citizens had to pay to register to vote. These taxes created significant barriers for impoverished citizens, disproportionately affecting African Americans and some poor whites. While the Twenty-fourth Amendment banned poll taxes in federal elections in 1964, they remained barriers in state and local elections until the VRA directed the Attorney General to challenge them.
Grandfather Clauses: To ensure that poll taxes and other requirements didn’t disenfranchise poor or illiterate white voters, many states enacted “grandfather clauses.” These provisions exempted citizens from requirements if their ancestors had been eligible to vote before 1867. Since African Americans weren’t granted the franchise until 1870, these clauses were transparently racist tools designed to create loopholes for white voters while excluding Black voters.
White-Only Primaries: In the solidly Democratic South, the real political contest was the Democratic primary, not the general election. By barring Black citizens from participating in primaries, the party effectively excluded them from the only meaningful stage of the political process.
Literacy Tests: The Ultimate Arbitrary Barrier
Among the most notorious tools of disenfranchisement were literacy tests. While presented as ensuring an educated electorate, their true purpose was providing subjective and arbitrary barriers that white election officials could use to fail Black applicants at will.
These weren’t good-faith assessments of reading ability. A Louisiana literacy test included tasks such as “Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence,” “Cross out the longest word on this line,” and “Spell backwards, forwards.” An Alabama test from 1965 included civics questions that would stump constitutional scholars, such as “If it were proposed to join Alabama and Mississippi to form one state, what groups would have to vote approval in order for this to be done?”
White applicants were often exempted through grandfather clauses or given simple passages to read, while Black applicants received complex legal texts or impossible tasks and failed for any minor error.
The results were devastating. In Mississippi, which had a large Black population, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African Americans were registered to vote after 1890. In Louisiana, where over 130,000 Black men had been registered in 1896, the number collapsed to just 1,342 by 1904. By 1940, a staggering 97% of eligible African Americans in the South were not registered to vote.
The Climate of Terror
Underpinning this legal framework was the constant threat and reality of violence. African Americans who dared to challenge the system and attempt to register or vote faced harassment, economic reprisals such as job loss, and brutal physical violence from both law enforcement and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
The murder of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—in Mississippi during the “Freedom Summer” voter registration drive of 1964 brought national attention to this reign of terror.
Bloody Sunday and the Road to Federal Action
The struggle for voting rights reached a critical turning point in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. In Dallas County, where Selma is located, more than half the population was African American, yet only 156 of the county’s 15,000 voting-eligible Black citizens were registered to vote.
Civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., organized a campaign to register voters, which met fierce resistance. On March 7, 1965, about 600 peaceful protestors attempted to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery to petition for their voting rights.
As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers and local possemen brutally attacked them with whips, nightsticks, and tear gas. The event became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
What made this moment different was the presence of television cameras. Shocking footage of state-sanctioned violence against unarmed, peaceful American citizens was broadcast across the country, horrifying the nation and galvanizing public support for federal action. The visual evidence of brutality transformed a regional struggle into an undeniable national moral crisis.
This public outrage provided President Johnson with the overwhelming political mandate he needed to demand that Congress pass meaningful voting rights legislation.
Engineering a Federal Response
In response to the crisis ignited by Bloody Sunday, President Johnson delivered a powerful address to a joint session of Congress. Invoking the anthem of the civil rights movement, he declared, “it is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote,” and urged passage of comprehensive voting rights legislation.
The resulting law, signed on August 6, 1965, wasn’t a generic anti-discrimination statute. It was a precisely engineered mechanism designed to dismantle the specific tools of disenfranchisement that had been refined for nearly a century.
A Nationwide Ban on Discrimination
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act established a permanent, nationwide prohibition against discrimination in voting. Its language closely tracked the Fifteenth Amendment, stating that no “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
This provision served as a general legal foundation for challenging discriminatory voting practices in federal court, applicable to every state and county in the nation.
The Coverage Formula: Targeting Historic Discrimination
Congress recognized that while voting discrimination could occur anywhere, it was deeply entrenched and uniquely resistant in certain parts of the country. To address this, Section 4 created a “coverage formula”—a data-driven, objective test—to identify these jurisdictions and subject them to special, more stringent remedies.
This formula was a critical constitutional innovation. By using objective criteria rather than simply naming states, Congress could justify applying extraordinary federal power to some states and not others—a necessary step to withstand legal challenges based on states’ rights.
The two-part formula automatically “covered” a state or political subdivision if it met both conditions:
- The jurisdiction maintained a “test or device” as a prerequisite to voting on November 1, 1964, including literacy tests, educational achievement requirements, “good moral character” tests, or requirements that a person be vouched for by another registered voter.
- The jurisdiction had low voter participation, meaning less than 50% of its voting-age population was registered to vote or had actually voted in the November 1964 presidential election.
This formula initially captured seven states entirely—Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—as well as numerous counties in four other states. For all these “covered jurisdictions,” Section 4 immediately and automatically suspended the use of all literacy tests and other similar devices.
Section 5: The Preclearance Revolution
The most potent and innovative weapon in the VRA’s arsenal was Section 5’s “preclearance” requirement. This provision was designed as a preventative measure, a federal shield to stop discriminatory voting changes before they could harm voters.
Under Section 5, all covered jurisdictions were legally prohibited from implementing any change to their voting laws or procedures—no matter how small—without first obtaining approval, or “preclearance,” from the federal government. This applied to everything from statewide redistricting plans and voter ID laws down to the relocation of a single polling place.
A covered jurisdiction had two ways to obtain preclearance:
- Submit the proposed change to the U.S. Attorney General for review. If the Attorney General didn’t object within 60 days, the change could take effect.
- Seek a “declaratory judgment” from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, proving to a three-judge panel that the proposed change “does not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”
Critically, Section 5 shifted the burden of proof. Instead of forcing minority voters to go to court to prove a law was discriminatory after the fact, the burden was now on the state or county to prove to the federal government that its proposed change was not discriminatory before it could be enacted.
Federal Enforcement Powers
To break the power of local officials who systematically denied registration to Black applicants, the VRA also authorized the Attorney General to appoint federal examiners in covered jurisdictions. These federal officials had the power to bypass local registrars and directly register qualified citizens to vote.
The Act also allowed for the deployment of federal observers to monitor polling places and ensure that registered voters were actually allowed to cast their ballots without intimidation.
Transforming American Democracy
The Voting Rights Act’s impact was immediate and profound. By the end of 1965, just months after the Act was signed, an estimated 250,000 new Black voters had been registered, with a third signed up directly by federal examiners who bypassed local resistance.
The transformation was most dramatic in states with the worst histories of disenfranchisement:
| State | Black Voter Registration (Pre-1965) | Black Voter Registration (Post-VRA, by 1967) |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 19.4% | >50% |
| Mississippi | 6.4% | >50% |
| Louisiana | 31.7% (1964) | >50% |
| Georgia | 27.4% (1964) | >50% |
| South Carolina | 37.3% (1964) | >50% |
Across the South, the registration gap between white and Black voters, which stood at nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s, shrank to just 8 percentage points within a decade.
Political Power and Representation
This surge in registration and turnout translated directly into tangible political power. For the first time in a century, African American communities could elect candidates responsive to their needs. The number of Black elected officials in the U.S. exploded, growing from fewer than 1,000 in 1965 to more than 10,000 by the early 2000s.
In 1972, Barbara Jordan of Texas and Andrew Young of Georgia became the first African Americans elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the South since Reconstruction.
The impact extended beyond politics. Economic studies have demonstrated a direct link between the VRA’s protections and economic progress. One analysis found that the VRA was responsible for approximately one-fifth of the narrowing of the wage gap between Black and white men in the South from 1950 to 1980, as newly accountable elected officials were compelled to address economic disparities.
Bipartisan Renewals and Expansions
The VRA’s history is one of dynamic adaptation. Recognizing that the struggle against discrimination was ongoing, Congress repeatedly reauthorized and expanded the Act’s temporary provisions, each time with overwhelming bipartisan support:
| Year | President | Key Actions & Amendments |
|---|---|---|
| 1970 | Richard Nixon | Extended Section 5 for 5 years; expanded coverage to include 1968 election data; banned literacy tests nationwide |
| 1975 | Gerald Ford | Extended Section 5 for 7 years; made nationwide literacy test ban permanent; expanded protections to “language minority groups” and mandated bilingual election materials |
| 1982 | Ronald Reagan | Extended Section 5 for 25 years; amended Section 2 to establish “results test,” overturning Supreme Court’s Mobile v. Bolden decision |
| 1992 | George H.W. Bush | Extended bilingual voting assistance provisions for another 15 years |
| 2006 | George W. Bush | Extended Section 5 and other temporary provisions for another 25 years with overwhelming bipartisan support (House: 390-33, Senate: 98-0) |
The 1982 Amendment: Overruling the Supreme Court
A pivotal moment came in 1982 when Congress demonstrated its authority by overruling a Supreme Court decision. Two years earlier, in City of Mobile v. Bolden, the Court had significantly weakened Section 2 by ruling that plaintiffs had to prove that a challenged voting law was created with racially discriminatory intent.
Proving intent is an exceptionally high legal bar, making it much harder to fight practices like at-large election systems or gerrymandered districts that diluted minority votes.
In response, a bipartisan Congress acted decisively to overrule the Court. The 1982 amendments explicitly rejected the Bolden intent standard and established a more practical “results test.” This amendment clarified that a voting practice is illegal if it results in discrimination against minority voters, regardless of the original intent of lawmakers.
To guide courts in applying this new test, Congress endorsed a “totality of the circumstances” analysis, encouraging judges to look at a range of factors to determine if a practice denies minority voters equal opportunity to participate in the political process.
The Supreme Court Strikes Back
For nearly five decades, the Voting Rights Act stood as the nation’s primary defense against voting discrimination. That foundation was profoundly shaken on June 25, 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County v. Holder.
Shelby County v. Holder: Dismantling Preclearance
The case was brought by Shelby County, Alabama, which argued that the conditions justifying federal preclearance in 1965 no longer existed and that the VRA’s special provisions were therefore unconstitutional. The central legal question was whether Congress had exceeded its authority when it reauthorized the VRA in 2006 using a coverage formula based on data from the 1960s and 1970s.
In a 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court didn’t strike down the preclearance requirement of Section 5 itself. Instead, it invalidated the coverage formula in Section 4(b), ruling it unconstitutional. Without a formula to determine which jurisdictions were covered, Section 5 was rendered inoperable, effectively ending preclearance nationwide unless Congress enacted a new formula.
The Majority’s Reasoning
The Court’s reasoning rested on two core arguments. First, the Court asserted that the coverage formula was based on outdated data that no longer reflected reality. The opinion stressed that “things have changed dramatically” since 1965. The Court pointed to the VRA’s own success as a reason for its obsolescence, citing data showing that voter registration and turnout gaps between Black and white voters in covered states had not only disappeared but, in some states, had inverted.
Second, the majority emphasized the constitutional principle of equal sovereignty of states. The opinion described preclearance as an “extraordinary departure from the traditional course of relations between the States and the Federal Government” that was only justified by the “exceptional conditions” of the civil rights era.
The ruling created a central paradox: it used the VRA’s remarkable success as the primary justification for dismantling its most effective provision.
Justice Ginsburg’s “Umbrella” Dissent
In a powerful dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that the majority had made a colossal error by ignoring the preventative nature of the law. She contended that improvements in minority voting were not a sign that the threat had vanished, but proof that the VRA’s protections were working as intended.
Her dissent featured a memorable analogy: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Justice Ginsburg argued that the Court was ignoring the massive 15,000-page record that Congress compiled before the 2006 reauthorization, which documented persistent and adaptive forms of discrimination that preclearance continued to block.
The Immediate Aftermath: A Flood of Restrictions
The impact of Shelby County was immediate and concrete. States, freed from the constraint of federal preclearance, moved swiftly to enact a new generation of voting restrictions. The speed of these changes provided powerful evidence that preclearance had been an active deterrent, holding back a wave of laws ready to be implemented the moment the federal shield was lowered.
Immediate State Actions
| State | Date | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Texas | June 25, 2013 | Within hours, the Attorney General announced immediate implementation of strict photo ID law blocked by preclearance in 2012 |
| Mississippi | June 25, 2013 | Secretary of State announced strict voter ID law would be implemented immediately |
| Alabama | June 28, 2013 | Released plan to enforce strict photo ID law passed in 2011 but not yet implemented |
| North Carolina | August 2013 | Governor signed omnibus law with multiple restrictions including cuts to early voting, elimination of same-day registration, and strict photo ID requirement |
This new wave represented a strategic shift to “second-generation” or “facially neutral” barriers. Unlike the explicit racial barriers of the Jim Crow era, these laws were often justified with non-racial rationales like “preventing fraud” or “improving efficiency,” but their practical effect was to disproportionately burden minority, elderly, low-income, and young voters.
Mass Polling Place Closures
One of the most significant consequences of the end of preclearance has been the mass closure of polling places. A comprehensive study by The Leadership Conference Education Fund documented that at least 1,688 polling places were closed between 2012 and 2018 in a majority of counties once covered by Section 5.
These closures were concentrated in states with large minority populations:
- Texas led with 750 polling place closures
- Arizona closed 320 locations, with Maricopa County alone shuttering 171 sites
- Georgia closed 214 polling places, with some rural counties left with only a single polling location to serve hundreds of square miles
Aggressive Voter Purges
Another tactic that surged after Shelby County is aggressive purging of voter registration rolls. A 2018 analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that between 2016 and 2018, the median purge rate in jurisdictions that had been subject to preclearance was 40% higher than in jurisdictions that had never been covered.
The report estimated that at least 17 million voters were removed from the rolls nationwide during that two-year period, and that formerly covered counties purged as many as 1.1 million people who would have remained if their purge rates had matched the rest of the country.
Widening Turnout Gaps
The cumulative effect of these barriers is reflected in voter turnout data. The decades-long trend of narrowing racial turnout gaps has reversed since 2013. A study from Harvard Kennedy School found that in the 2016 presidential election, minority voter turnout fell more sharply in counties freed from federal oversight than it had in decades.
Brnovich: The Second Blow
The Shelby County decision disabled the VRA’s preventative shield, funneling all voting rights enforcement into after-the-fact litigation under Section 2. In 2021, the Supreme Court dealt a second major blow in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, this time weakening the primary weapon used in that litigation.
The Arizona Case
The Brnovich case was the Supreme Court’s first opportunity to interpret how Section 2’s “results test” applies to “time, place, or manner” voting rules—laws that regulate the logistics of voting rather than district lines. The lawsuit challenged two Arizona policies:
- An “out-of-precinct” policy that required election officials to discard any ballot cast in the wrong precinct on Election Day, even if the voter was eligible for statewide offices.
- A law banning third-party ballot collection, criminalizing the practice of community organizers, neighbors, or activists collecting and delivering sealed mail-in ballots for others.
Plaintiffs argued that both laws had discriminatory results, presenting evidence that Hispanic, Black, and particularly Native American voters were disproportionately harmed.
New Barriers to Proving Discrimination
In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court upheld both Arizona laws and effectively rewrote the standard for Section 2 claims. The majority declined to establish a single clear test but articulated five “guideposts” that collectively make it much more difficult for plaintiffs to win:
- Size of the burden: The “mere inconvenience” of a voting rule is not enough to violate Section 2.
- Departure from 1982 practice: If a voting rule was common when Congress last amended Section 2 in 1982, it’s less likely to be discriminatory today.
- Size of disparate impact: The Court found that racial disparities must be large in absolute terms to be legally significant.
- Total voting opportunities: Courts should look at a state’s election laws as a whole; if a state provides many convenient voting methods, restrictions on particular methods are less problematic.
- State interests: The Court gave significant weight to states’ asserted interests, particularly preventing potential voter fraud, even without evidence fraud is occurring.
Implications for Future Litigation
The Brnovich decision significantly weakened Section 2 as a tool to fight “vote denial” claims. It shifted legal analysis away from a primary focus on discriminatory results—the standard Congress established in 1982—toward a new, more defendant-friendly balancing test.
Under this framework, a court can acknowledge that a law has disparate racial impact but still uphold it by pointing to the state’s other voting options or its interest in “election integrity.”
The Path Forward: John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
In response to the Supreme Court decisions that dismantled key VRA pillars, the primary legislative response has been the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA). Named for the late congressman and civil rights icon beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the bill is designed to restore and modernize the VRA.
Core Provisions
New Coverage Formula: Instead of relying on decades-old data, the bill would subject states and localities to preclearance based on recent voting rights violations. A state would be covered for 10 years if it accumulated a certain number of violations over the previous 25 years.
Practice-Based Preclearance: The bill creates separate preclearance requirements for specific types of voting laws known to have been used for discriminatory purposes. This would apply nationwide and include strict voter ID laws, reductions in multilingual voting materials, and changes that consolidate or reduce polling places in minority communities.
Strengthening Section 2: The JLVRAA seeks to codify legal standards for proving discriminatory results, effectively overturning the Brnovich decision’s restrictive “guideposts.”
The Divide
The debate over the JLVRAA reflects a profound partisan divide. Supporters, including civil rights organizations like the ACLU and NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argue the legislation is urgently needed to stop the documented wave of voter suppression since 2013. They contend the bill’s new formula is a rational response to Shelby County because it’s based on contemporary, objective evidence of discrimination.
Opponents, including conservative organizations like The Heritage Foundation and many Republican leaders, frame the bill as dangerous federal intrusion into states’ rights to administer elections. They argue that the “rampant” discrimination justifying the original VRA no longer exists, pointing to high minority voter turnout as proof that federal oversight is unnecessary.
Legislative Status
The political landscape has shifted dramatically from the overwhelming bipartisanship of the 2006 VRA reauthorization (98-0 in the Senate) to deep partisan polarization today. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act passed the House in August 2021 on a nearly party-line vote of 219-212. In the Senate, however, the bill has been repeatedly blocked, unable to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.
This procedural hurdle has become the key obstacle to federal voting rights reform. The contrast between the unanimous 2006 reauthorization and today’s gridlock illustrates how dramatically American politics has changed. What was once considered a fundamental American principle—protecting the right to vote—has become another front in the nation’s culture wars.
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