Sam Levine and Kira Lerner for The Guardian:
In 2013, the US supreme court gutted the pre-clearance requirement in a landmark case called Shelby county v Holder. In a 5-4 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Voting Rights Act’s formula used to determine which cities and states had to submit their election law changes was outdated and unnecessary. States like Georgia were now free to implement changes without federal government approval.
The decision unleashed a wave of voter suppression across the country. States once covered by section 5 pre-clearance have enacted new laws requiring voters to show ID, cutting early voting, making it harder to vote by mail, aggressively removing voters from the rolls and implementing maps that blunt the electoral power of Black and Hispanic voters. They have also closed polling places, forcing voters to travel long distances to cast ballots…
In the last decade, the states and jurisdictions previously covered by section 5 have collectively passed at least 20 laws that restrict voting, according to data from the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks state legislation. Though there’s no way to know for certain whether the justice department would have rejected all of those laws, many included provisions previously blocked by the federal government.
Liz Avore, senior policy advisor for the Voting Rights Lab, also said there are clear trends among the types of laws passed after the Shelby decision, indicating that legislatures saw the ruling as an opening.
Five states pushed strict voter ID laws, for example, either leading up to or immediately after the Shelby decision.
And the ruling put activists at a severe informational and legal disadvantage. It cut away a safety net and replaced it with Whac-a-Mole, forcing groups like Butler’s to scramble to keep track of all the changes and then pick and choose where to bring costly and time-consuming legal challenges. Courts have been increasingly hesitant to embrace those challenges.
The Brennan Center has been tracking and cataloging this trend of restrictive voting legislation from its inception. Legislation is categorized as restrictive if it contains one or more provisions that would make it harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the voter rolls, or vote as compared to existing state law.
Since Shelby County was decided, at least 29 states have passed 94 restrictive voting laws.
Janai Nelson for the LDF:
“Voters were failed by the Supreme Court in 2013 when it disabled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the decade that followed, Congress has continued to fail voters, year after year, by neglecting to update the statute that singularly transformed our democracy. Multiple cases, including recently in Allen v. Milligan, have proven that racial discrimination still pervades our electoral process and the right to vote requires reinforced protections to ensure that our electoral process is fair and lawful – particularly in this moment of crisis in our democracy. We call on the Supreme Court to revisit the premise of the Shelby County decision in the next case that provides that opportunity, and we demand that the 118th Congress modernize the VRA.”
“LDF has testified before successive Congresses over the last ten years, providing evidence of the urgent need to renew the crucial protections under the VRA given that voting conditions remain discriminatory. LDF and countless other non-partisan civil rights groups have also invested significant resources to defend our elections from voting policies and procedures that never would have been implemented had the Section 5 preclearance formula been enforced. LDF has documented many of these voting violations in our Democracy Diminished reports, including rampant voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, and other irreversible acts of disenfranchisement that have resulted from the Supreme Court’s suspension of Section 5. We call on the Supreme Court to avail itself of the next opportunity to recognize that Congress’ predictive judgment about the persisting need for Section 5 to deter discriminatory voting practices has been proven to be eminently reasonable and based on facts that the Court unjustly ignored. Therefore, it is prudent that the Court reverse the portions of Shelby in which the Court eviscerated Section 5, based on the Court’s own judgement that conditions had changed to the point that the provision was no longer necessary.
We also demand that Congress pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and further call on voters to elect a Congress in 2024 that will pass an updated VRA should the 118th Congress fail to do so.”