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Friend,
Ten years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to democracy. In Shelby County v. Holder, the high court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation ever.
It did so by nullifying the preclearance provision, which had for nearly half a century blocked voter suppression laws in the South and other jurisdictions with a demonstrable history of discrimination in voting. Eight years later, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court further weakened the VRA by making it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws.
The Shelby decision unleashed a wave of restrictive, discriminatory voting laws that have made it harder for millions of people to cast a ballot, especially people of color. In the decade since the high court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, 29 states have passed nearly 100 restrictive voting laws. Voters have felt the toll of these laws, which may have been blocked by preclearance previously. Here are just a few issues encountered by Southern Poverty Law Center clients:
- In Mississippi, a blind voter who is unable to vote without assistance from a trusted neighbor finds casting a ballot even more difficult under a new state law that severely limits the people authorized to assist voters and criminalizes those who try.
- In Alabama, thousands of Black voters across multiple counties found their voices silenced by Alabama’s racially gerrymandered state House and Senate maps. The state also silenced Black residents though its racially gerrymandered congressional maps and then blatantly defied a court order to remedy the discrimination, underscoring the urgent need to restore the VRA. Overall, dozens of racially gerrymandered voting maps in use in the Deep South today have diluted the power of Black voters and other voters of color.
- In Georgia, after a new law shortened the voting period for the runoffs, long lines meant a voter had to go to the polls three times before she was finally able to vote. Had she not succeeded in that third attempt, she likely wouldn’t have voted at all due to pending travel for work.
Elsewhere, laws have closed polling stations, purged voter rolls, curbed voting by mail, imposed strict ID requirements and limited multilingual voting materials. Growing racial turnout gaps, especially in the Deep South, show the discriminatory impact of these laws. The harm in the Deep South alone caused by the gutting of the VRA a decade ago has been enough to fill a report we issued earlier this year.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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