DemDaily: What is the Voting Rights Act? and Status
August 10, 2026
Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), the most far-reaching civil rights legislation in modern US history.
More than half a century after its passage, those rights have been all but decimated by the courts, and an unprecedented number of voter suppression laws passed in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country.
The greatest threat today, however, may come at the hands of our current President, who appears determined to dismantle the remaining vestiges of the civil rights movement that laid the foundation for our democracy six decades ago.
| "The fight to defend the right to vote begins with understanding where we've been and knowing where we are now." - Voting Rights Activist Stacey Abrams |
History
The Voting Rights Act (VRA), passed on August 6, 1965, prohibits racial discrimination in voting and was designed to enforce the voting rights of racial minorities guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
The landmark legislation came out of the turbulent civil rights movement of the 1960s that witnessed mass resistance to decades of oppression and discrimination against African-Americans at home and the ballot box.
From the firebombing of black churches across the South and deaths of three Mississippi volunteers during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, to the brutal beatings of activists during the peaceful voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in March of 1965, Americans grew outraged at the violence sweeping the country.
Lyndon B. Johnson, who assumed the presidency following the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, had been re-elected by a landslide in 1964 and made enshrining voting rights a mandate of his administration.
In the wake of the "Bloody Sunday" events in Selma, Johnson called for comprehensive voting rights legislation. Addressing a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, he said, "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy."
Two days later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in Congress, jointly sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL).
Key provisions included Section 2, which closely followed the language of the 15th Amendment and banned election practices that denied the right to vote based on race, and Section 5, which required jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to get federal "preclearance" approval before enacting any changes to their election laws. Other provisions required bilingual ballots and election materials for jurisdictions with significant language minority populations, while another outlawed literacy tests and similar devices used to disenfranchise racial minorities.
Five months later, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders present, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act into law, calling it "A triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield." By the end of 1965, a quarter-million new African-American voters had been registered.
In the ensuing decades, Congress passed major amendments extending the VRA's protections in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006.
Erosion of Rights
In 2013, however, the US Supreme Court's (SCOTUS) 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder struck down the federal pre-clearance provision under Article 5 that had applied to the perniciously discriminatory states of Alabama, Arizona, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, as well as counties and townships in other states.
| The majority opinion in Shelby v. Holder, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the court's four other conservative justices, reasoned the disparate treatment of the states is "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day." |
The ruling opened the floodgates, ushering in a wave of restrictive state voting rights laws. Bills to reinstate critical safeguards failed to pass Congress, and after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, attacks against voting rights increased exponentially.
By 2018, at least 23 states had enacted restrictive voter laws, including closing over a thousand polling places nationwide in predominantly African-American counties.
In a July 2021 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Court further eroded the VRA's protections, holding in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee that two Arizona voting laws were not racially discriminatory under the Fifteenth Amendment and Section 2. The court also rewrote the guidelines for evaluating Section Two cases, making it more difficult to challenge prejudicial voting laws.
In June 2023, in a surprise 5-4 decision in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court upheld one of the key pillars of Section 2, ruling in favor of Black voters who challenged Alabama's GOP-drawn congressional districts, which included only one majority-Black district out of seven in a state that was 27% Black, as gerrymandered.
In a devastating blow to democracy, the high Court's 6-3 conservative majority, on April 29, 2026, flipped the interpretation of Section 2 and struck down Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district -- holding that race-conscious redistricting under Section 2 of the VRA is unconstitutional.
The landmark ruling in Louisiana v. Callais overturns more than 60 years of precedent and all but nullifies the gains and sacrifices of generations of Americans who fought to ensure that every citizen has an equal vote in our elections. It also fulfills a decades-long campaign by conservative Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito to roll back civil rights legislation.
Pending: The 2022 Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe is a high-profile case centered on whether private citizens and Tribal Nations have the legal authority to sue under Section 2 of the VRA -- a fundamental right recognized for decades by Congress, the courts, the DOJ, and private litigants.
In July 2025, SCOTUS temporarily paused a ruling from the conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals that would have overturned that right, and on May 18, 2026, the Court officially vacated the appeals court's ruling and remanded the case back for re-evaluation in light of Louisiana v. Callais. On August 7, 2026, North Dakota Secretary of State Michael Howe filed a challenge.
DemList will keep you informed.
| In the States: Just in the period from January 2025 and May 2026, 19 unique states enacted 44 laws making it harder for eligible Americans to cast a ballot amid over 770 restrictive laws having been proposed. Twelve states have enacted their own version of the Voting Rights Act. |
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Sources: Brennan Center, SCOTUSBlog, New York Times, History.com, US Congress, US Commission on Civil Rights, Axios, Slate, ScotusBlog, US Supreme Court, Native American Rights Fund
