In response to post-Shelby assaults on voting rights, voting rights organizations across the country stepped up their work to protect and advance the right to vote and move us closer to the vision of a nation of, by, and for the people.
Department of Justice, the North Carolina law was struck down by a federal judge who said it targeted African Americans with “ almost surgical precision.” Officials in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Virginia shortly joined the ranks of those intent on exercising their newly won power to turn back the clock to an earlier time when election laws and practices in many places were marked by blatant discrimination and racism. After a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups and the U.S. Texas officials, in fact, acted on the same day of the Shelby decision to institute a strict voter identification law that previously had been blocked under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because of its impact in suppressing the vote of low-income people and racial minorities. The North Carolina law was just one of many similar laws passed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2013 Shelby ruling.
On August 11, North Carolina’s governor signed a voter identification law seen by many as an attempt to suppress the votes of people of color. In the ensuing decades, the preclearance provisions proved to be a remarkably effective means of discouraging state and local officials from erecting new barriers to voting, stopping the most egregious policies from going forward, and providing communities and civil rights advocates with advance notice of proposed changes that might suppress the vote. Justice Department for approval (or “preclearance”). In addition to barring many of the policies and practices that states had been using to limit voting among African Americans and other targeted groups, the Voting Rights Act included provisions that required states and local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of suppressing voting rights based on race to submit changes in their election laws to the U.S. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and other icons of the civil rights movement at his side. President Lyndon Johnson signed the measure on August 6 with Dr. The vote was decisive and bipartisan: 79-18 in the Senate and 328-74 in the House. Inspired by voting rights marches in Alabama in spring 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Adding to the problems, government at all levels has largely failed to make the necessary investments in elections (from technology to poll-worker training) to ensure the integrity and efficiency of the system. These activities have a demonstrable and disproportionate effect on populations that are already underrepresented at the polls. A whopping 23 states created new obstacles to voting in the decade leading up to the 2018 elections, according to the nonpartisan coalition Election Protection. Holder, paving the way for states and jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to enact restrictive voter identification laws. Greater voter enfranchisement was met with fresh resistance and in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in its ruling on Shelby County v. Thus began a new era of push-and-pull on voting rights, with the voting age reduced to 18 from 21 and the enshrinement of voting protections for language minorities and people with disabilities. The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed by Congress took major steps to curtail voter suppression. Over time, voting rights became a bipartisan priority as people worked at all levels to enact constitutional amendments and laws expanding access to the vote based on race and ethnicity, gender, disability, age and other factors.
Even as barriers to voting began receding in the ensuing decades, many Southern states erected new ones, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, aimed at keeping the vote out of the hands of African American men. Indeed, America began its great democratic experiment in the late 1700s by granting the right to vote to a narrow subset of society - white male landowners. Challenges to voting rights in this country, like the ones we've seen recently, are hardly a 21st-century invention. Entrenched groups have long tried to keep the vote out of the hands of the less powerful.
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