The Voting Rights Act: Gutted, Defended, and Why It Still Matters

On the morning of March 7, 1965, approximately six hundred people walked two by two out of Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, and turned east toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They carried no weapons. They sang no songs. John Lewis, twenty-five years old and already a veteran of sit-ins and Freedom Rides that had fractured his skull at least once before, walked at the front alongside Hosea Williams. When they crested the bridge’s arc, they saw what was waiting for them on the other side: a solid line of Alabama state troopers in blue helmets, some on horseback, gas masks clipped to their belts. Behind the troopers stood Sheriff Jim Clark’s mounted posse — men who had already ridden horses into church congregations and beaten parishioners with clubs. A state trooper with a bullhorn gave the marchers two minutes to turn around. They did not turn around. They knelt to pray.

What happened in the next few minutes was broadcast into living rooms across America and changed the course of American law. Troopers waded into the crowd with clubs and tear gas. Horsemen rode directly into the kneeling marchers. Lewis took a nightstick blow to the skull that fractured his cranium. Amelia Boynton Robinson, one of the movement’s anchors in Selma, was beaten unconscious and left in the road. A photograph of her limp body, face bloodied, appeared on the front pages of newspapers in every major American city the next morning. ABC News interrupted its broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg” to show footage of the assault. The irony of that interruption — a film about the legal apparatus of a genocidal state, cut away from to show American law enforcement attacking unarmed Black citizens on a bridge — was not lost on anyone.

President Lyndon Johnson watched the footage from the White House. Eight days later, he stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered what many historians consider the most powerful speech of his presidency. “At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” he said. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” Then, quoting directly from the anthem of the civil rights movement, the President of the United States said into a microphone before the full Congress: “We shall overcome.”

But to understand why those six hundred people were on that bridge, and why what happened to them shook a nation, you have to go back not eight days but a hundred years — to the moment the United States first promised Black citizens the right to vote, and the generations of calculated brutality that followed that promise.

The Fifteenth Amendment and Its Betrayal

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in February 1870, was blunt: the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Frederick Douglass called it “the most important event” since the Emancipation Proclamation. And for a brief period, it functioned. During Reconstruction, Black men exercised the franchise in force. Between 1870 and 1877, sixteen Black men served in Congress; more than six hundred served in state legislatures across the South; hundreds more held local offices as sheriffs, tax collectors, judges, and aldermen. Mississippi sent two Black men to the United States Senate — Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce — and would not send another for over a hundred years. The brief, luminous experiment of Reconstruction demonstrated what Black political participation could produce when it was protected by federal force.

The counterrevolution was swift and comprehensive. When federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877 as part of the Compromise that ended Reconstruction, former Confederate states began systematically dismantling everything that had been built. The instruments of disenfranchisement were so ingeniously layered that they would take nearly ninety years and the full weight of federal law to dismantle. Poll taxes — flat fees required of every voter — were calibrated to exactly what a Black sharecropper living in the cotton economy could not afford to pay, since sharecroppers were often paid in credit against a company store rather than in cash at all. Literacy tests, administered entirely at the discretion of white registrars, required Black applicants to read and interpret passages from state constitutions, sometimes demanding recitation from memory; the same registrars who failed Black professors and schoolteachers would register illiterate white men without a second glance. Mississippi’s constitution required applicants to “give a reasonable interpretation” of any section a registrar chose — a standard that, applied at a registrar’s whim, was impossible to meet and impossible to appeal.

Grandfather clauses exempted men from literacy and property requirements if their grandfather had voted before 1867 — an explicit mechanism to include white men while excluding Black men whose grandfathers had been legally prohibited from voting. White primaries, which the Democratic Party operated as private organizations throughout the South, excluded Black voters entirely from the only elections that actually mattered in a one-party region. Property requirements, residency requirements, and periodic purges of voter rolls compounded the effect. The legal scaffolding was reinforced by extralegal terror: the Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirt paramilitaries, and local vigilantes made clear that Black citizens who attempted to register did so at risk to their homes, their livelihoods, and their lives.

The results were catastrophic and, from the perspective of those engineering them, precisely as intended. In Louisiana, Black voter registration fell from more than 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 by 1904 — a 99 percent reduction in eight years. In Mississippi, a state where Black citizens constituted a majority of the population, fewer than 6 percent of eligible Black adults were registered to vote by 1900, and that number would remain suppressed for generations. By the mid-twentieth century, the Fifteenth Amendment existed as a constitutional provision with no operational force whatsoever throughout most of the Deep South. It had been nullified, not by formal repeal, but by a century of legal creativity and organized violence.

The Infrastructure of the Movement: SNCC, SCLC, and the People Who Built Selma

The march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge did not materialize from nowhere. It was the culmination of years of painstaking, dangerous, unglamorous organizing work in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is the county seat. In 1963, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began voter registration work in Selma, only 335 of the county’s 15,000 eligible Black residents were registered to vote — about 2 percent. The Dallas County courthouse registrar’s office was open only two days per month. Applicants who showed up were turned away, made to wait for hours, subjected to deliberately confusing questionnaires, or simply told to come back later. Those who persisted were often photographed by deputies, whose photographs were shared with employers. The message was clear: register, and you will be fired.

Into this environment came the organizers. Amelia Boynton Robinson — the woman who would be left unconscious on the bridge in 1965 — had been fighting for voting rights in Selma since the 1930s, when she and her first husband Sam Boynton conducted voter registration drives and hosted NAACP meetings in their home. After Sam died in 1963, Amelia ran for Congress as the first Black woman to seek office in Alabama, an act of political theater as much as electoral ambition, designed to keep voting rights in the public eye. Bernard and Colia Lafayette of SNCC arrived the same year and began the meticulous work of community organizing: finding local leaders, conducting workshops on the registration process, accompanying residents to the courthouse in groups, documenting every rejection. The work was slow, and the danger was constant. SNCC workers were beaten, arrested, and threatened with death so regularly that they developed protocols for checking in with each other to confirm they had not been killed.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Selma in January 1965, drawn by the specific conditions that made the city useful for a national campaign. The cruelty and visibility of Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, who wore a button on his uniform that read “Never” and who could be reliably counted upon to brutalize demonstrators in front of cameras, made Selma strategically valuable in a way that Selma’s Black residents had already been suffering from for decades. The SCLC-SNCC partnership — sometimes tense, since the two organizations had competing philosophies and egos — began a series of marches to the courthouse and sustained demonstrations through January and February 1965. By late February, a young deacon named Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been trying to register to vote for years, was shot in the stomach by a state trooper while attempting to protect his mother during a demonstration in Marion, the county seat of neighboring Perry County. He died eight days later. He was twenty-six.

It was Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death that precipitated the march to Montgomery. James Bevel of the SCLC proposed it. The idea was to carry Jackson’s body the fifty-four miles to the state capital and lay it on the steps of Governor George Wallace’s office. Wallace would not let them through. And so, on March 7, they tried to march anyway — not with a body, but with an intention. And they were beaten for it on national television.

From Selma to the Senate: The Legislative Battle

After Bloody Sunday, the pressure on Congress was unlike anything since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. More than two thousand clergy descended on Selma from across the country within days. A second march, led by Martin Luther King, turned back peacefully at the bridge on March 9 after a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against further marching — a decision that caused a split between the SCLC and SNCC, with many SNCC members furious at what they saw as King backing down. A Unitarian minister named James Reeb, who had come from Boston to participate in the demonstrations, was beaten by white men outside a Selma restaurant that same evening and died two days later. His death prompted nationwide outrage, including a personal phone call from President Johnson to Reeb’s widow — a call that drew its own complicated response from Black activists who noted that Johnson had not personally called Jimmie Lee Jackson’s family.

Johnson introduced voting rights legislation to Congress on March 15, 1965, eight days after Bloody Sunday. The speech he delivered that evening was, by any measure, extraordinary. Johnson was a Texas politician who had voted against every civil rights measure during his Senate career. He had been a practitioner of Southern politics. And yet on March 15, he stood before Congress and said: “There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government — the government of the greatest nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country — to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.” He invoked Appomattox and Gettysburg, Lexington and Concord. And then he said it: “We shall overcome.”

The legislation moved with unusual speed. The Senate debated the Voting Rights Act for twenty-four days and rejected every weakening amendment before passing it 77–19 on May 26. The House passed it 328–74 on July 9. Lyndon Johnson signed it into law on August 6, 1965, using fifty pens — one of which he handed to John Lewis. Martin Luther King was in the room. Rosa Parks was in the room. The pen given to Lewis represented something more than ceremony: it was an acknowledgment that the law did not originate in Congress but in the years of organizing, the beatings, the murders, and the sustained courage of people who had been told for a century that their suffering was their own problem.

What the Law Actually Did: The Mechanics of the VRA

The Voting Rights Act was not simply a reiteration of the Fifteenth Amendment. It was an enforcement mechanism — a set of operational tools designed to make the constitutional guarantee function in states where a century of ingenuity had rendered it inert. Understanding the law requires understanding its architecture, which was deliberately precise and deliberately powerful.

Section 2 applied nationwide and prohibited any voting law or practice that resulted in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color. It was the law’s broadest provision and gave minority voters the right to sue to invalidate discriminatory practices anywhere in the country. Section 2 cases were litigated through the courts and required plaintiffs to prove discrimination — a high bar and a slow process, but a permanent and universal protection.

The law’s most radical and most consequential provisions, however, were Sections 4 and 5. Section 4 established a coverage formula to identify which jurisdictions had a history of voting discrimination severe enough to require special federal oversight. The formula identified states and counties that had used a discriminatory “test or device” — a literacy test, good character test, or similar barrier — as of November 1964, and in which less than 50 percent of the voting-age population had registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election. The result: nine states were initially covered in whole or in part, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. The coverage formula was designed to be precise rather than punitive — it targeted the specific jurisdictions with documented records of mass disenfranchisement, not the South as a whole or states the federal government happened to dislike.

Section 5 was the law’s enforcement engine. It required covered jurisdictions to obtain federal approval — “preclearance” — before implementing any change to their voting laws or procedures. Any change, no matter how minor it appeared: a new polling place location, a change to absentee ballot procedures, a new district map, a change to municipal boundaries, a new identification requirement. Covered jurisdictions had to demonstrate to either the Department of Justice or a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit that the proposed change did not have the purpose and would not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race. The burden of proof was on the jurisdiction, not on the voters. This was the inversion that made preclearance so powerful: instead of requiring Black voters to find lawyers, file lawsuits, and survive years of litigation to challenge discriminatory laws that had already taken effect, Section 5 required the state to prove its innocence before the law went into effect at all.

The law also dispatched federal examiners and federal observers directly into covered counties. Examiners could register voters on the spot, bypassing state registrars entirely. Observers were stationed at polling places to monitor elections and report violations. In counties where state registrars had systematically refused to register Black voters for decades, federal examiners registered tens of thousands of new voters in the first months after the law’s passage. The effect was immediate and dramatic. Within two years of the VRA’s enactment, Black voter registration in Mississippi had climbed from 6.7 percent to 59.8 percent. In Alabama, it went from 19.3 percent to 51.6 percent. In Georgia, from 27.4 percent to 52.6 percent. These were not marginal statistical improvements. They were a political revolution, accomplished in two years, in states where the same change had been violently suppressed for ninety.

What the VRA Produced: A Democratic Transformation

The political consequences of the Voting Rights Act reshaped the American South and, through the South, the nation. The numbers tell part of the story. In 1965, the year the law passed, there were fewer than 300 Black elected officials in the entire South. By 1970, that number had risen to more than 700. By 1980, it exceeded 2,500. By 2000, it was over 9,000. Black mayors governed cities from Birmingham, Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia, to New Orleans, Louisiana — cities where, a generation earlier, Black residents could not vote at all. Black sheriffs won election in counties where Black men had been lynched for looking at a white woman. Black school board members, state legislators, county commissioners, and judges assumed offices that had been closed to them not by their own failure but by the architecture of legal terror.

The VRA’s effects extended beyond Black officeholding. It changed the politics of white Southern officeholders, who now had to compete for Black votes or lose elections. It produced a Southern Democratic coalition that briefly incorporated Black and working-class white voters before the Republican Party’s Southern strategy began peeling white voters away through racial backlash. It forced the drawing of majority-minority congressional districts in states across the South, creating Black political representation in Congress that has been both democratically vital and legally contested ever since. And it established an institutional norm — that the federal government had both the authority and the obligation to actively protect the voting rights of citizens against state governments that would otherwise suppress them — that would be central to American democracy for nearly half a century.

Section 5’s preclearance requirement blocked more than 1,000 discriminatory voting changes between 1965 and 2013. These were not all dramatic acts of racial exclusion. Many were subtle — the kind of procedural change that, without preclearance, would have been implemented, would have operated to suppress Black turnout for years, and would have required expensive litigation to challenge after the fact. A change to polling hours. A shift from district to at-large elections in a jurisdiction where at-large elections diluted Black voting power. A move of a polling place from a location near a Black neighborhood to one harder to reach without a car. Individually, none of these changes looked like Jim Crow. Cumulatively, they produced the same result.

The Reauthorizations: Congress Keeps Renewing What It Sees

The Voting Rights Act was not intended to be permanent in its special provisions. Congress built in a five-year sunset on the Section 4 coverage formula and Section 5 preclearance, anticipating that the worst discrimination would be corrected and the extraordinary measures would no longer be needed. Four times between 1965 and 2006, Congress revisited the evidence, renewed the provisions, and extended their reach.

The 1970 reauthorization extended the law’s special provisions for five years and lowered the voting age to eighteen (a provision the Supreme Court applied to federal elections, prompting the Twenty-Sixth Amendment). In 1975, Congress extended the law again for seven years and expanded its coverage to protect language minorities — including Spanish speakers in Texas and the Southwest, and Native American and Alaskan Native voters — marking the law’s transformation from a specifically Southern remedy to a broader national protection. In 1982, Congress extended the law again, this time for twenty-five years, and strengthened Section 2 in response to a Supreme Court decision that had narrowed its reach; the amended Section 2 prohibited not only intentionally discriminatory voting practices but also those with discriminatory effects, regardless of intent. This was a significant expansion: proving discriminatory intent in court is notoriously difficult, since legislators rarely announce it. Proving discriminatory effect, while still demanding, is at least a matter of evidence rather than mind-reading.

The 2006 reauthorization was the most extensive review in the law’s history. The Republican-controlled House and Senate conducted hearings over ten months, gathering testimony from more than ninety witnesses, reviewing more than 15,000 pages of evidence, and examining the record of voting rights violations in covered jurisdictions since 1982. What they found was not a problem that had been solved. They found more than 600 successful objections to discriminatory voting changes under Section 5 since the 1982 reauthorization. They found ongoing voter intimidation, ongoing manipulation of election rules to dilute Black political power, ongoing litigation under Section 2 producing evidence of persistent discrimination in covered jurisdictions. The congressional record was blunt: the conditions that necessitated the VRA’s special provisions had not disappeared; they had evolved. The law was reauthorized for twenty-five years by a vote of 98–0 in the Senate and 390–33 in the House. President George W. Bush signed it. It was, at that moment, one of the least contested pieces of major federal legislation in American history.

Shelby County v. Holder: The Day the Court Rewrote History

Seven years after Congress voted 98–0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and its coverage formula based on a comprehensive record of ongoing discrimination, the Supreme Court of the United States held, 5–4, that the coverage formula was unconstitutional.

Shelby County, Alabama — a suburban county outside Birmingham that had a documented record of discriminatory voting changes blocked by Section 5 — had filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the coverage formula. Its argument was that the formula, based on electoral data from 1964, was too outdated to justify the burden it imposed on covered jurisdictions, regardless of whether discrimination was still occurring. The county had benefited specifically from the kind of mobility and economic development that made it predominantly white and predominantly Republican; Black residents remained underrepresented in Shelby County government even as white voters proliferated in the suburbs. In June 2013, the Supreme Court agreed with Shelby County.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, acknowledged that the Voting Rights Act had been enormously successful. “Dramatic changes have occurred,” he wrote. Black voter registration and turnout had increased dramatically in covered states. Black officeholders now served in numbers that would have been unimaginable in 1965. These achievements, Roberts argued, were evidence that the coverage formula was no longer justified — that it punished states for problems they had already solved. He invoked the principle of “equal sovereignty” among the states: the formula, by treating Alabama and Mississippi differently from Connecticut and Maine, imposed a burden that was unfair to states that had changed. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote, in the sentence that would become the opinion’s most cited and most contested phrase. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent was furious and precise. She argued that the majority had precisely inverted the logic of constitutional law. The VRA’s success was not evidence that the problem was solved; it was evidence that the remedy was working. “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,” she wrote. She walked through the 15,000-page congressional record Congress had assembled in 2006 — the testimony, the blocked discriminatory changes, the continuing evidence of second-generation voter suppression in covered jurisdictions — and argued that Congress had done exactly what the Constitution requires: gathered evidence, made findings, and tailored its remedy to the conditions on the ground. The majority had substituted its judgment for Congress’s on a factual and legislative question Congress was far better positioned to resolve. And the “equal sovereignty” principle Roberts invoked, Ginsburg noted, had no precedent in constitutional law when applied to federal legislation targeting actual, documented differences in state behavior. States are not sovereigns in relation to the federal government, and the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by appropriate legislation. Whether the VRA was “appropriate” was a question the elected branches, not the Court, were designed to answer.

The Court did not formally strike down Section 5 preclearance. It struck down Section 4’s coverage formula, which determined which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance. The result was the same: without a valid coverage formula, Section 5 had no jurisdictions to cover. Preclearance was over. And it was over based on an argument that the law had worked too well to be necessary — an argument that Ginsburg, and most voting rights scholars, found logically incoherent and historically illiterate.

The Hours After Shelby: What Happened When the Umbrella Disappeared

The decision was handed down on June 25, 2013. Within hours, the state of Texas announced that a strict voter photo ID law it had previously sought to implement — and which the Department of Justice had blocked under Section 5 preclearance because of its discriminatory effect on minority voters — would take effect immediately. Mississippi announced the same, implementing a voter ID law that had been held pending preclearance. North Carolina, within weeks, passed one of the most comprehensive voter suppression laws in the country: it required photo ID, cut early voting by a week, eliminated same-day voter registration, ended pre-registration for teenagers, and eliminated out-of-precinct provisional voting. An analysis later found that the law’s provisions targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision” — the phrase came from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck the law down in 2016.

The pace of polling place closures in formerly covered jurisdictions accelerated sharply after Shelby. A 2019 report by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found that counties previously covered by Section 5 had closed more than 1,600 polling places since the decision. The closures were concentrated in Black communities and rural areas with large minority populations. In Maricopa County, Arizona — which had been subject to Section 5 coverage for its language minority provisions — the number of polling locations dropped from 200 in the 2012 presidential primary to 60 in 2016, a 70 percent reduction in a county of four million people. Hours-long lines resulted. In Texas, after Shelby enabled the state’s voter ID law to take effect, an estimated 600,000 registered voters who lacked the required ID were unable to vote; the burden fell disproportionately on Black and Latino citizens who were less likely to hold the specific forms of identification the law accepted while excluding others (a student ID from the University of Texas was insufficient; a concealed handgun license was acceptable).

The DOJ retained enforcement authority under Section 2, meaning it could still sue states and counties for discriminatory voting laws after the fact. But the asymmetry was devastating. Under preclearance, a jurisdiction had to prove it was not discriminating before a law took effect. Under post-Shelby Section 2 litigation, civil rights organizations and the DOJ had to gather evidence, file suit, navigate years of discovery, survive motions to dismiss, survive appeals, and prevail in court — all while the discriminatory law was operating and suppressing votes. By the time a court struck down a voter suppression law, it had often already been used in two or three election cycles. The damage was done.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee: The Court Finishes the Work

If Shelby County gutted Section 5, the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee began the work of gutting Section 2. The case arose from two Arizona voting policies: one that discarded ballots cast in the wrong precinct, and another that prohibited third parties (including campaign workers and community organizations) from collecting and delivering mail-in ballots. Arizona’s Hispanic, Black, and Native American voters used out-of-precinct voting and ballot collection at higher rates than white voters, and the policies fell disproportionately on them. The Ninth Circuit had struck down both policies under Section 2, finding that they imposed a discriminatory burden on minority voters.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 6–3 majority, reversed. He articulated a new set of “guideposts” for evaluating Section 2 claims: courts should consider the overall opportunities available to minority voters, not just the specific burdened practice; the size of any disparity between minority and non-minority burden; whether the challenged practice was commonplace among other states; the state’s interest in preventing fraud; and whether the challenged practice was recently changed. None of these factors were in the text of Section 2 or in its legislative history. Alito constructed them from whole cloth, and critics argued they were designed to make Section 2 claims systematically harder to win — that virtually any voting restriction could survive the new framework as long as a state could point to a fraud-prevention rationale, no matter how thin, and as long as some form of voting access remained available somewhere in the state.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent was direct about what the majority had done: “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’” She documented in careful detail the history of the VRA, the intent of Section 2, and the ways the majority’s new framework departed from the law’s text, purpose, and precedent. The majority, she argued, had done by judicial fiat what Congress had refused to do: narrow the VRA’s protections to the point where the most common forms of contemporary voter suppression were effectively immune from legal challenge.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act: Congress Tries to Respond

Congress could, in theory, fix what the Supreme Court broke in Shelby County. The Court did not say preclearance was unconstitutional; it said the coverage formula was outdated. It invited Congress to write a new formula based on contemporary evidence. Congress has, in every session since 2013, introduced legislation to do exactly that — legislation named, after his death in July 2020, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

John Lewis died on July 17, 2020, in the midst of a summer of unprecedented mass protests for racial justice. He had represented Atlanta in Congress since 1987. He had been beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. He had spent his entire adult life in the service of voting rights, and he spent his last year in Congress advocating for legislation to restore what the Court had taken. The House passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in August 2021, four hundred days after his death, 219–212, with no Republican votes. It died in the Senate, where it could not overcome a filibuster that required 60 votes to break. A companion measure, the Freedom to Vote Act, met the same fate. Despite a 51–48 Senate majority for Democrats in January 2022, efforts to change the filibuster rules to allow the voting rights bills to pass on a majority vote fell short when Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema declined to support the rules change.

The John Lewis VRAA would have established a new coverage formula based on contemporary data, requiring preclearance for states and jurisdictions with recent histories of voting rights violations. It would have expanded the types of changes subject to preclearance, including changes to voter ID requirements, polling place locations and hours, and voter roll purge practices. It would have strengthened Section 2 by countering the Brnovich framework and codifying the totality-of-circumstances test the law had previously been understood to require. And it would have established new transparency requirements, including advance notice for voting changes and increased access to election information. None of it became law.

The Contemporary Architecture of Suppression

Contemporary voter suppression does not look like the literacy tests and poll taxes of 1955. It has been engineered to be legible as neutral administration rather than racial exclusion — a design feature, not a coincidence, since discriminatory intent is difficult to prove in court under what remains of Section 2 after Brnovich. But its effects fall along the same fault lines they always have.

Strict photo ID requirements disproportionately affect Black, Latino, elderly, and low-income voters, who are statistically less likely to hold government-issued photo ID. Studies have consistently found that the types of ID most commonly accepted — driver’s licenses, state-issued identification cards, passports — are less commonly held by racial minorities and poor Americans, while other forms of commonly held identification — student IDs, employer badges, utility bills — are frequently excluded. States that have enacted the most restrictive ID laws have, with remarkable consistency, also been states with significant Black populations and competitive elections.

Aggressive voter roll purges remove registered voters from the rolls, often based on flawed data that disproportionately flags minority voters for removal. Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, oversaw the purge of approximately 340,000 voters from the rolls in the two years before his 2018 gubernatorial election against Stacey Abrams. An investigation found that a significant share of those purges were based on address-verification mailers that were sent to voters and removed those who did not respond, a process that disproportionately captured voters who had moved within Georgia or whose mailers were not delivered. A separate program called “use it or lose it” purged voters for inactivity — for not having voted in a certain number of elections — a practice the Supreme Court upheld 5–4 in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (2018).

Polling place consolidations reduce the number of voting locations in ways that lengthen lines and travel times, burdens that fall hardest on voters who lack flexible employment schedules, reliable transportation, or the luxury of spending three hours waiting to cast a ballot. Cuts to early voting, including the elimination of Sunday early voting — the period most heavily used by Black churches conducting organized “Souls to the Polls” voting drives — are similarly targeted in their effect while facially neutral in their framing. Restrictions on voter registration drives, criminal penalties for voter registration errors that deter organizations from running drives, and restrictions on returning citizens’ voting rights after incarceration compound the picture.

These restrictions operate together, as a system. No single restriction is necessarily enough to change the outcome of an election in any given jurisdiction. But taken together — the narrow ID requirements, the purged rolls, the reduced polling places, the cut early voting hours, the criminalized registration drives — they create an environment in which voting requires significantly more effort for some citizens than others. And the citizens for whom it requires more effort are, with consistent statistical regularity, Black, Latino, Native American, and low-income. This is not coincidence. It is policy.

The Stakes: What Voting Rights Are Actually For

It is tempting to discuss the Voting Rights Act as a legal or technical matter — as a question about coverage formulas and Section 2 tests and the contours of preclearance. That framing, while accurate in its particulars, risks losing sight of what is actually at stake. Voting is not merely a civic ritual or a legal right in the abstract. It is the mechanism through which people who are governed by a government participate in deciding what that government does. In a democracy, the right to vote is not one right among many. It is the right on which all other rights depend.

This is what Frederick Douglass understood in 1870 when he celebrated the Fifteenth Amendment. This is what the architects of disenfranchisement understood when they spent thirty years engineering a system to nullify it. This is what Amelia Boynton Robinson understood when she spent decades in Selma registering voters one by one in a courthouse that was open two days a month. This is what John Lewis understood when he walked onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge knowing that what waited on the other side might kill him. The vote is not symbolic. It is how people who are governed protect themselves from being governed against their interests by people who are unaccountable to them.

The history of the Voting Rights Act is therefore a history of a specific American argument about power: who gets to exercise it, who gets to constrain it, and who gets to suffer the consequences when it is exercised without check. The white supremacists who designed the poll tax and the literacy test understood that Black political power, if left free to operate, would change the distribution of resources, opportunities, and protections in ways that disadvantaged the white oligarchies that had run the Southern states since Reconstruction’s end. They were right, and that was precisely the point. Voting rights were contested not because of abstract constitutional principle but because of concrete economic and political interest.

When a state legislature cuts early voting hours in counties with large Black populations while expanding them in counties with predominantly white populations — as North Carolina did before the Fourth Circuit invalidated the measure — it is making a calculation about whose votes it prefers to count and whose votes it prefers to lose. When a state enacts a voter ID law that accepts hunting licenses but not student IDs, it is choosing which voters to make more comfortable and which voters to make less so. These choices have consequences for everything that follows: for who wins elections, for what policies those winners pursue, for who benefits from government and who does not. The Voting Rights Act was the federal government’s most serious attempt to interrupt that cycle. Its erosion is the federal government’s most serious recent failure to uphold the promise of equal citizenship.

The Bridge Is Still There

The Edmund Pettus Bridge still stands over the Alabama River in Selma. Edmund Pettus was a United States Senator from Alabama and the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The bridge was named for him in 1940, twenty-five years after his death, at a moment when Alabama wanted to honor what he had represented. There have been efforts over the years to rename it, including a congressional resolution to rename it the John Lewis Bridge. As of this writing, it is still the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Every year on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, civil rights leaders, politicians, and citizens from across the country walk across that bridge in a commemorative march. John Lewis walked it every year until his death. In March 2015, the fiftieth anniversary, President Barack Obama walked across it holding the hands of Lewis and Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was ninety-nine years old and was pushed across in a wheelchair. Obama spoke from the foot of the bridge about what had happened there, and about what remained unfinished. “To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency and our own wisdom. We have made progress,” he said. “But we’re not where we need to be. All these things we’ve talked about are hard. And the march is not yet over.”

What was true in 2015 is still true in 2026. The Voting Rights Act survives in a diminished form. Section 2 still exists, though Brnovich has made it harder to use. Section 5 preclearance still exists as a statutory provision, though Shelby has left it without a jurisdictional formula to operate. Congress has the power to restore preclearance by passing a new coverage formula, and has declined to do so. As of 2024, more than 450 bills restricting voting access had been introduced in state legislatures since 2020, and dozens had been enacted into law.

The people who walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 were making a claim. They were claiming that the right to vote was not a privilege to be granted or withheld by those in power, but an inherent entitlement of citizenship that the government was obligated to protect. They paid for that claim with fractured skulls and blood on the asphalt and lives cut short. The law that emerged from their sacrifice represented the nation’s agreement, however incomplete and contested, with the claim they were making. The erosion of that law — through the Supreme Court’s reinterpretation of its provisions, through the legislative deadlock that has prevented its restoration, through the proliferation of restrictions that mimic the effects of the old disenfranchisement without its overt racial vocabulary — is an ongoing argument about whether the nation still means what it said when Lyndon Johnson signed that law in a room that included the man who had been beaten for asking to exercise the rights the law protected.

The argument is not settled. It is being conducted right now, in state legislatures and federal courts and election administration offices and congressional hearing rooms and, ultimately, in the decisions of voters about whether to participate in a system that does not always make it easy for them to do so. The people on that bridge walked toward the troopers not because they were confident they would win, but because they understood that the alternative was to accept a world in which they were governed without their consent. That understanding, and the willingness to act on it at personal cost, is the most important inheritance of the civil rights movement. It is not a relic. It is a demand.