rights
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965. The VRA was passed to put an end to discriminatory election practices and to protect every American’s constitutional right to vote. The Voting Rights Act put a stop to unfair election practices that were designed to disenfranchise voters and was enacted to ensure that new restrictive measures would be prevented.
When Congress passed the VRA, there was an acknowledgment that racial discrimination in elections was more common in certain areas of the country than others. Therefore, Section 4(a) of the VRA established a formula to identify the problem areas and to define the appropriate remedies. The formula included the following:
Did the state/county use a “test or device” that could potentially prohibit an American from registering and/or voting (i.e., a literacy test or morality test)?
Did less than 50 percent of voting-aged citizens register to vote on November 1, 1964, or did less than 50 percent of voting-aged citizens vote in the 1964 presidential election?
This formula identified seven “covered jurisdictions”: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. Plus, certain counties in four additional states: Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho and North Carolina.
In addition to potential remedies, these “covered jurisdictions” were subject to something called “pre-clearance,” a process whereby new election laws had to be reviewed by the U.S. Justice Department before they went into effect.
Without question, the Voting Rights Act was extremely effective. Black voter turnout increased from 7 percent to 67 percent within just five years – in Mississippi alone.
Years later, Time magazine reflected on the success of the VRA:
The measure’s reaffirmation of the right to vote regardless of ‘race or color’ applied to all states, and by 1980 the percentage of the adult black population on the voter rolls in the South had already surpassed that in the rest of the country. Although 3 million more white than black voters were added to southern rolls in the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act’s ‘special coverage’ states, which showed a combined total of 72 black elected officials in 1965, boasted nearly 1,000 a decade later. By the mid-1980s there were more black people in public office across the South than in the rest of the nation combined. Although the share of public officeholders still fell well short of the black share of the population, by 2001 the gap outside the South was nearly 4 times greater than within it.
Even today, the U.S. Department of Justice’s website still says: “Soon after passage of the Voting Rights Act, federal examiners were conducting voter registration, and black voter registration began a sharp increase. The cumulative effect of the Supreme Court’s decisions, Congress’ enactment of voting rights legislation, and the ongoing efforts of concerned private citizens and the Department of Justice, has been to restore the right to vote guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments. The Voting Rights Act itself has been called the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.”
In 1970, Congress granted a five-year renewal for special provisions in the legislation that were set to expire. In 1975, these provisions were extended for an additional seven years. In fact, they were even broadened to include other “language minority groups” (defined as people who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives or of Spanish heritage). In 1982, Congress extended the provisions for an additional 25 years, and in 2006 they were extended for yet another 25 years.
However, the party came to an end in 2013 when, in the court case Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, saying “the Act imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs” and that “a departure from the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty requires a showing that a statute’s disparate geographic coverage is sufficiently related to the problem that it targets.”
The Supreme Court also ditched the pre-clearance requirement. So, states were now allowed to pass new voting restrictions that would have previously been evaluated beforehand under the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the only recourse American citizens have now is to fight unfair, discriminatory practices in court – case by case – after they have already been implemented. The U.S. Supreme Court justified this by saying: “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.”