A Promise Deferred: How the Voting Rights Act Was Won — and Undone
Preface for the Next Two Newsletters. This is the first of two newsletters on voting rights and how they have continued to be whittled back in recent decades.
Today’s newsletter includes excerpts from my book, It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field. I will briefly share the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, how successive Republican and Democratic presidents reinforced the Act for nearly fifty years, and how a 2013 Supreme Court decision allowed voting rights to slowly unravel, leading to new restrictive laws, racial gerrymandering, and Census manipulation.
The subsequent newsletter will review current attacks on voting rights in 2025, highlight a new case that goes before the Supreme Court during its current term, and discuss the potential implications if the Court strikes Section 2 from the Act.
Bottom Line Upfront
1. A Hard-Fought Victory for Democracy
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 arose from decades of Black activism and sacrifice, banning literacy tests, empowering federal oversight, and prohibiting racial discrimination in voting — bringing American democracy closer to its promise.
2. Progress and Resistance in the Jim Crow South
Despite ongoing efforts by Southern states to weaken Black voting power through gerrymandering, annexations, and changes to election procedures, the Act closed the registration gap, increased Black voter participation, and expanded Black representation in government.
3. The 2013 Shelby Earthquake
The Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the preclearance formula, ignoring the fact that equality in voting rates existed because of those protections. The result was an immediate surge of restrictive state laws aimed squarely at Black and Brown voters.
4. A New Era of Suppression
Post-Shelby laws slashed polling places, limited early voting, imposed harsh ID requirements, and purged millions from voter rolls — policies that disproportionately burden Black voters, reversing decades of progress and widening turnout gaps.
5. Gerrymandering and the Re-Segregation of Power
By packing Black voters into a handful of districts or splitting them to weaken influence, partisan gerrymandering — now largely beyond federal scrutiny — has diluted political power and reduced access to equitable public resources.
6. Fraud Myths as a Tool of Disenfranchisement
False claims of voter fraud — a historical tactic of voter suppression — exploded after 2020, targeting Black-majority cities and fueling a wave of restrictive laws, despite overwhelming evidence that fraud is virtually nonexistent.
7. Manipulating the Census, Rigging Representation. Political interference in the 2020 Census caused undercounts of Black and Latino populations, distorting congressional representation and federal funding — a calculated move to maintain White political dominance and weaken communities of color.
8. The Backlash Never Ended
The struggle for voting rights did not conclude in 1965 — it evolved. From Supreme Court decisions to legislative rollbacks, the backlash against Black political power persists, demanding renewed vigilance and sustained action to protect the right to vote.
Introduction
Decades of activism by Black leaders and the Black community culminated in three major victories during the 1960s: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The urgency to pass a new voting rights law increased in 1964 after the murders of three Civil Rights workers from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
The Voting Rights Act “outlawed literacy tests and provided for the appointment of federal examiners (with the power to register qualified citizens to vote) in those jurisdictions that were ‘covered’ according to a formula provided in the statute. In addition, Section 5 of the act required covered jurisdictions to obtain ‘preclearance’ from either the District Court for the District of Columbia or the U.S. Attorney General for any new voting practices and procedures. Section 2, which closely followed the language of the 15th Amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition of the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.”[1]
The Act essentially committed the U.S. to prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
A 1975 revision to the Act banned literacy tests. Seven years later, Congress passed another revision, stating that jurisdictions would be liable under the Act “if the effect of their policies is to discriminate against voters, regardless of intent.”[2] Finally, a Republican-led Congress passed the 2006 reauthorization of the Act, extending the core revisions for another 25 years, through 2031.
Unsurprisingly, during the first four years after the original Act was enacted, Southern White leaders in the six affected states—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and numerous North Carolina counties—challenged the Act in court, without success. The Act remained in effect for another forty-eight years (1965-2013—more on 2013 shortly), despite these jurisdictions collectively proposing changes to voting several thousand times—changes that federal officials found violated Section 5 and that mostly aimed to dilute the Black vote.
In what ways? Through:
Annexations of racially discriminatory districts
Racial gerrymandering and
Changes to election methods that would reduce the right to vote of Black citizens and other people of color.[3]
Fortunately, before each of these jurisdictions could proceed with any change, they had to revise their proposals to align with the Act.
Achievements of the Act
Because of the Act, Black voter registration rates have increased over more than four decades to levels similar to those of Whites nationwide. The 30 percent gap in the early 1960s between White and Black voter registration shrank to 8 percent within a decade.[4]
Because of ongoing efforts by jurisdictions to undermine proper voting practices, the Senate reauthorized the Act with overwhelming bipartisan support, first in 1970, then again in 1975, 1982, and most recently in 2006. Republican presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush each signed the reauthorizations into law.[5]
In the first two decades after the Act, the number of African Americans elected to state legislatures in Southern states increased from a handful to nearly 200. Yet, almost all these electoral successes occurred in districts where Black citizens comprised most of the voters. In districts where they were the minority, it remained exceedingly rare for voters to elect Black candidates. As a general rule, White voters in the South refused during this time to support Black candidates at all.[6]
In fact, the Act sped up a massive change in the national political landscape. Whereas until 1965, White conservative Democrats in the South held most state and national offices, as Black voters supported more liberal candidates in those states, Southern Whites switched their party loyalty from Democrat to Republican in large numbers from the 1960s to the 1990s. This change continues to influence our increasingly divided politics today.[7]
2013: How the Supreme Court Dismantled the Essence of the Voting Rights Act
In 2013, almost everything changed for the Voting Rights Act when the U.S. Supreme Court (Shelby County v. Holder) struck down a key provision, the coverage formula in Section 4b, ruling it outdated. Why? Because the court observed that voter registration rates for Whites and Blacks in these states had become more or less equal. Therefore, they decided there was no longer a need to keep that provision in place.
Most of the justices failed to recognize that voting rates had only equalized and been maintained because the provision was in effect. Since 2013, jurisdictions covered under that section (the original Southern states listed above, along with five additional ones) no longer need to seek preclearance (Section 5 of the Act) to alter their voting laws.[8]
This court decision sparked a surge of voting law changes in these states, with the number of changes rising sharply after the 2020 presidential election. Following that election, many Republican leaders falsely claimed that fraud had affected the national election. As a result, they pushed for urgent action in states to combat fraud. I’ll cover this in more detail later.
In 2021 alone, nineteen states passed thirty-four new restrictive laws. Eight more states enacted nearly a dozen restrictive laws in 2022, and over thirty states prepared more than 100 additional restrictive bills for consideration in 2023.[9]
Four of the seven states covered nationwide by Section 5 were among the most active in passing restrictive laws in 2021: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alaska.
Iowa, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Montana also enacted their own restrictive laws at a similar pace. Among these laws were restrictions that led to:
Reduced polling place availability.
Limited the number, location, or availability of mail ballot drop boxes.
Imposed harsh voter ID requirements.
Shortened the window to apply for and submit mail ballots.
Restricted or eliminated early voting and same-day voter registration.
Expanded voter purges or risked faulty voter purges.
Made voter registration more difficult.
Restricted Sunday voting.
Restricted assistance in returning a voter’s mail ballot..
How do these law changes disproportionately affect Black voters? For instance, many polling places that were previously accessible in or near Black neighborhoods are now unavailable, requiring voters to travel farther to find an open location. The same is true for ballot drop boxes; many in or near Black residential areas have been removed.
Black people also disproportionately work in jobs where it is much harder to take off on voting day; therefore, restrictions on early voting limit their options for days and times when they are more likely to vote. Black churches played a key role in encouraging African Americans to vote on Sundays after church, but by eliminating Sunday voting, states reduced the opportunity for those who tend to vote on that day. And so on.
The Racial Voter Turnout Gap Returns
A 2021 Brennan Center for Justice study showed that changes made since 2013 significantly altered the White-Black turnout gap in the six states subject to preclearance under the 1965 Act. While by 2013, Black citizens had achieved a slightly higher voter turnout in each of these states, the change resulting from the Supreme Court’s decision caused Black turnout to decrease so much that by 2020, in five states, the White turnout rate increased from 6 percent higher to 15 percent higher than that of Black voters.[10]
How had this changed so dramatically? Between 2014 and 2016, states purged sixteen million voters from their rolls, an enormous increase compared to the earlier two-year periods. States covered under the Voting Rights Act showed the highest increases in purged rolls.[11]
To clarify, voter roll purges are a common practice in every state to keep lists current and ensure that those who have moved or are no longer eligible are removed. However, officials do not always carry out each purge correctly or accurately, and the increase in purges in recent years has become increasingly alarming.
The Brennan Center for Justice found in 2018 that four states—Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and New York—had conducted illegal purges based on the federal 1993 National Voter Registration Act, and that other states have rewritten policies that now violate the Act.[12]
Many of these purges disproportionately affected African Americans. Why? Because Republican-controlled legislatures in these states understand Black voters tend to vote for Democrats at high rates. Policies that create complex barriers to the Black vote increase the likelihood of Republicans winning office. There are no similar voter purges in so-called blue (Democratic-led) states; in fact, Democrats in Congress have tried, unsuccessfully, to ban widespread voter purges.
In states that now require voters to register only if they have a current government-issued ID, the impact on Black people is disproportionate, as 25 percent nationally lack such an ID. Whites are at 8 percent nationally. In Georgia, 80 percent of voters who did not meet the state’s new “exact match” ID law were African American residents.[13]
The millions of Americans who lack these IDs and are “disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Such voters more frequently have difficulty obtaining ID, because they cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining [a] government-issued photo ID card.”[14]
One must wonder whether the Supreme Court justices who issued this decision truly intended for “preclearance” to no longer be necessary in these states to prevent discriminatory changes. What has actually happened shows that the states affected, and many others that the Shelby County v. Holder decision has encouraged, are quick to find new, systematic, and innovative ways to disproportionately penalize African American voters—and voters of color in general.[15] And states have been doing so in the decade since.
Voting is important in any community, but especially in communities of color.
Suppose voting closely reflects the racial demographics of a specific state or locality. In that case, elected officials are more likely to advocate in Congress (and within their state) for policies that address the needs and aspirations of those communities and residents. Such advocacy in Congress can influence whether a state receives sufficient funding for a variety of federally supported programs, ranging from clean water and healthcare to improved schools.
Yet, voter restriction issues go well beyond the fallout from the court’s Shelby decision.
Racial Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering in America is a political blood sport aimed at protecting individual elected officials and securing or strengthening a party’s majority. Although technically illegal to manipulate voting districts to benefit a political party, such practices occur frequently with few political or legal repercussions. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court raised the stakes on partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause. The court’s decision shifted the responsibility from the federal government to states, allowing state Republican parties to discriminate against Democratic voters as long as there was no explicit racist intent against Blacks (most of whom are Democrats).
Gerrymandering not only impacts voting ability and influences election results, but when manipulated along partisan lines—and with racial bias—it makes it harder for communities of color to access better schools, roads, and healthcare.
According to World Population Review, nine states are the most gerrymandered in the country; two are in Democratic-controlled states (Maryland and Pennsylvania), and the rest are in Republican-controlled states, mostly in the South (North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas), as well as in Ohio and Utah. Specifically, North Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana officials redistricted in ways that adversely affected Black voters.[16]
Federal lawsuits filed in Alabama and Georgia also allege that redistricting in both states disproportionately affected Black voters.
In North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature merges the entire Black population—about one-third of North Carolinians—into just two legislative districts, which diminishes their ability to influence elections outside those districts. North Carolina’s decision came despite the 2017 Supreme Court ruling that its redistricting was unconstitutional.[17]
Accusations of Voter Fraud
Although states passed many new laws restricting voting in the immediate half-decade after Shelby, new and proposed restrictions intensified after the 2020 presidential election. With President Trump’s relentless flow of false claims about supposed widespread Democratic-led voter fraud in the two and a half months before President-elect Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, many Republicans echoed these doubts, questioning the integrity of the entire election process. The pressure continues today, bringing new and proposed restrictions every month across more than two dozen states.
More than eighteen months after the 2020 election, national polls showed that nearly 70 percent of Republican voters still believed Democrats stole the election. Less than half of Independent voters and fewer than 10 percent of Democratic voters shared this belief.[18]
Worse still, a year after the election, over three-quarters of Fox News viewers believed Democrats stole the election, as did nearly 100 percent of One America News and Newsmax audiences.[19]
It’s crucial to acknowledge that allegations of voter fraud within the Black community also run through U.S. history dating back to the post–Confederate South. “During Reconstruction . . . , reports that Black voters intended to commit fraud served as grist for massive campaigns of voter suppression and intimidation.”[20]
During that time, Democrats (then the conservative party) would accuse the White-led Republican party of stealing elections, primarily because of Black voter fraud.
Long-standing claims of illegal Black voting also contributed to instigating the 1898 White-on-Black massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, which led to the overthrow of a Black-led city government.[21]
Throughout most of the twentieth century, White Americans used poll taxes and literacy tests explicitly to prevent Black citizens from voting. In the past twenty years, numerous researcher-led studies of claims of voter fraud, along with many court cases, have found that actual voter fraud is minimal across the U.S. and it is near-impossible to find a case in which it has influenced electoral outcomes.[22]
This constant and underhanded drumbeat of widespread voter fraud claims, despite there being no evidence, does not bode well for American democracy.
The voter fraud claims made by Republican officials targeted several places, most notably the majority-Democratic cities where they alleged it happened.
Conveniently, the President Trump–inspired allegations targeted cities with large Black and Brown voter rolls. His lawyers alleged voter fraud in Atlanta (48 percent Black), Detroit (78 percent Black), Milwaukee (69 percent Black), Philadelphia (44 percent Black), and Phoenix (43 percent Latino), all states where the final vote margin was relatively slim. All five are majority-minority cities with large Black populations, except Phoenix. In Atlanta, Trump himself claimed that hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes had tipped the race in Georgia to Biden.
Election officials examined all allegations made but could not confirm any of them.
The Trump campaign targeted only cities for investigation in the swing states where the presidential vote was relatively close. They did not target any of the White-majority counties for fraud next to those five cities; as we’ve seen above, these accusations follow a historical pattern of White leaders looking for ways to cast doubt on the Black vote.
Here, it also helped worsen racial division at a fraught time in our history—without ever explicitly calling out race.[23]
Census Manipulation
The U.S. Census Bureau carries out a nationwide population census every ten years, with the most recent one conducted in 2020. The results of the census determine how House of Representatives seats are allocated, which influences congressional redistricting. After the Census is completed, states begin their redistricting process.
Based on Census results, the federal government allocates $1.5 trillion in aid to states and municipalities. Therefore, an accurate count is crucial in ensuring that jurisdictions receive their fair share of federal funds for healthcare, public schools, housing, transportation, infrastructure, job training, and environmental quality, including clean air, water, and soil.
Proper allocations are crucial for programs like Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), child nutrition programs, Head Start, Section 8 housing vouchers, and special education in schools. If there are undercounts in the Census, the resulting funding shortages would disproportionately impact African Americans in areas receiving less funding, since their participation in these programs is disproportionately high.
In 2022, the Census Bureau itself “reported that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans were undercounted at higher levels in 2020 compared with 2010—Hispanics by a statistically significant amount—while White and Asian Americans were overcounted.”[24] The Bureau estimated the “undercount” for Blacks to be 3.3 percent and for Latinos nearly 5 percent and the “overcount” for Whites at 1.64 percent.[25]
This news is troubling for African Americans. But where does meddling come in?
Senior career-level Census officials wrote an internal memo in September 2020, near the end of President Trump’s term, citing unprecedented meddling to manipulate the final Census count to benefit Republicans. The issues they highlighted included “crucial technical aspects of the count, including the privacy of census respondents, the use of estimates to fill in missing population data, pressure to take shortcuts to produce population totals quickly, and political pressure on a crash program that was seeking to identify and count unauthorized immigrants.”[26]
Bottom line? Trump administration officials took extraordinary measures to politically interfere with the final Census count. They wanted to give Republicans a more significant advantage in drawing congressional and state-level districts and in allocating federal dollars.
Across the nation, this interference advantages the Republican party while disadvantaging Black and Brown populations and the states where they are concentrated.
Conclusion
Like many instances of Black progress, the pushback and resistance to voting rights started soon after the laws were passed, only growing into a groundswell much later.
Recently, I discovered that the current Supreme Court Chief Justice started his federal career in 1981 as a young lawyer in President Reagan’s Department of Justice (DOJ), working as a special assistant to the Attorney General. The year before, the Court issued a ruling in City of Mobile v. Bolden that weakened Section 2 of the Act by requiring voters to prove that officials had intentionally discriminated against Blacks and other minorities.
The ruling heralded “a new conservative counterrevolution in the law—a backlash against the historic and liberal-leaning civil rights laws of the 1960s.”[27]
However, by 1982, a bipartisan group in Congress sought to override this decision by passing an amendment to the Act that would enhance Section 2 protections for Black voters.
Within the DOJ, the Attorney General tasked Roberts with developing a strategy to oppose the proposed amendment “while minimizing the odds that Reagan would get labeled as racist for doing so.”[28] He urged the Attorney General to act decisively against the amendment. Years later, his former DOJ colleagues revealed Roberts was quite doubtful about any aspect of the Act’s usefulness.
Remember, this was only seventeen years after the Act’s passage.
It’s not surprising, then, that Roberts eventually led the effort on the Supreme Court to undermine its purpose and results, starting with the Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2013.
The fight for voting rights didn’t end in 1965; it only entered a quiet new phase of resistance that reached a peak with the Shelby County ruling. Since then, through racial gerrymandering, manipulation of the Census, and ongoing accusations of voter fraud in Black communities, these actions have created advantages for White voters while systematically hurting Black voters and communities.
Next week: the ongoing efforts to roll back voting rights in 2025, plus the implications of a current Supreme Court case that may set the country back even further.
Footnotes
[1]. “Milestone Documents: Voting Rights Act (1965),” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act.
[2] Jamelle Bouie, “The Death of the Fourth American Republic,” The New York Times, August 6, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/opinion/supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html.
[3]. ”Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965#cite_note-Posner-144 (Section, Impact).
[4]. “The Effects of Shelby County v. Holder,” Brennan Center for Justice, August 6, 2018, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/effects-shelby-county-v-holder.
[5]. “Milestone Documents: Voting Rights Act (1965).”
[6]. Bernard Grofman and Lisa Handley, ”The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on Black Representation in State Legislatures,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1, February 1991, pp. 111–114.
[7]. Richard H. Pildes, “Why the Center Does Not Hold: The Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in America,” California Law Review, Vol. 99, 2011, in Abstract.
[8]. “The Shelby County Decision,” The United States Department of Justice, updated November 29, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/crt/shelby-county-decision.
[9]. “Voting Laws Roundup: December 2022,” Brennan Center for Justice, December 2022, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2022.
[10]. Kevin Morris, Peter Miller, and Coryn Grange, “Racial Turnout Gap Grew in Jurisdictions Previously Covered by the Voting Rights Act,” Brennan Center for Justice, August 20, 2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/racial-turnout-gap-grew-jurisdictions-previously-covered-voting-rights.
[11]. “Voter Purges,” Brennan Center for Justice, https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/voter-purges.
[12]. Morris et al., “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” Brennan Center for Justice, July 20, 2018, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/purges-growing-threat-right-vote.
[13]. Theodore R. Johnson and Max Feldman, “The New Voter Suppression,” Brennan Center for Justice, January 16, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression.
[14]. “Oppose Voter ID Legislation – Fact Sheet,” American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet.
[15]. Vann R. Newkirk, II, “How Shelby County v. Holder Broke America,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2018.
[16]. “Most Gerrymandered States 2022,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-gerrymandered-states.
[17]. Linda Kramer Jenning, “As Communities of Color Grow, Racial Gerrymandering Takes Center Stage, YES! Magazine, September 29, 2021, https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2021/09/29/census-gerrymandering-racial-redistricting.
[18]. Jon Greenberg, “Most Republicans still falsely believe Trump’s stolen election claims. Here are some reasons why,” Poynter, June 16, 2022, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republicans-falsely-believe-stolen-election-trump/.
[19]. Justin Klawans, “82% of Fox News, 97% of OANN, Newsmax Viewers Believe Trump’s Stolen Election Claim: Poll,” Newsweek, November 1, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/82-fox-news-97-oann-newsmax-viewers-believe-trumps-stolen-election-claim-poll-1644756.
[20]. Nick Tabor, “Voter Fraud Propagandists Are Recycling Jim Crow Rhetoric,” The New Republic, February 4, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/165283/suppress-black-vote-jim-crow.
[21]. Brandon Tensley, “A short history of the long conservative assault on Black voting power,” CNN, May 8, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/08/politics/black-voter-suppression/index.html.
[22]. “Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth,” Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law, https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf.
[23]. Mark Allan Williams, “The Fight to Protect Voting Rights Enters the Next Round,” YES! Magazine, August 6, 2021, https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2021/08/06/protect-voting-rights-congress-members-arrested.
[24]. Editorial Board, “The Trump administration’s assault on the census must not happen again,” The Washington Post, July 26, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/26/trump-assault-census-must-not-happen-again/.
[25]. Hansi Lo Wang, “The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans,” National Public Radio (NPR), March 11, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/03/10/1083732104/2020-census-accuracy-undercount-overcount-data-quality.
[26]. Michael Wines, “Census Memo Cites ‘Unprecedented’ Meddling by Trump Administration,” The Washington Post, January 15, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/us/2020-census-trump.html.
[27] Jay Willlis, “John Roberts Has Waited His Whole Life For This Moment,” Balls and Strikes, October 17, 2025, https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/john-roberts-killing-voting-rights-act/.
[28] Ari Berman, “Inside John Roberts’ Decades Long Crusade Against the Voting Rights Act,” Politico, August 10, 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/john-roberts-voting-rights-act-121222/.