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Voting Rights Act
Voting Rights Act, U.S. legislation (August 6, 1965) that aimed
to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that TABLE OF CONTENTS
prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote
under the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of Introduction
the United States. Considered among the most comprehensive Background
pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history, the Voting Passage of the Voting Rights Act
Rights Act (VRA) significantly widened the franchise. It
Legal challenges
continued to provide far-reaching protection of minority voting
rights until the early 21st century, when the U.S. Supreme Court
Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., August
6, 1965.
issued two decisions—Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021)
—that greatly weakened the law.
Background
Shortly following the American Civil War (1861–65), the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing that
the right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Soon
afterward the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that made it a federal crime to interfere with an individual’s right
to vote and that otherwise protected the rights promised to former slaves under both the Fourteenth (1868) and
Fifteenth amendments. In some states of the former Confederacy, African Americans became a majority or near
majority of the eligible voting population, and African American candidates ran and were elected to office at all
levels of government.
Nevertheless, there was strong opposition to the extension of the franchise to African Americans. Following the
end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Supreme Court of the United States limited voting protections under federal
legislation, and intimidation and fraud were employed by white leaders to reduce voter registration and turnout
among African Americans. As whites came to dominate state legislatures once again, legislation was used to
strictly circumscribe the right of African Americans to vote. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, whites-
only primaries, and other measures disproportionately disqualified African Americans from voting. The result was
that by the early 20th century nearly all African Americans were disfranchised. In the first half of the 20th
century, several such measures were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1915, for example,
grandfather clauses were invalidated, and in 1944 whites-only primaries were struck down. Nevertheless, by the
early 1960s voter registration rates among African Americans were negligible in much of the Deep South and
well below those of whites elsewhere.
Passage of the Voting Rights Act
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In the 1950s and early 1960s the U.S. Congress enacted laws to
protect the right of African Americans to vote, but such legislation
was only partially successful. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was
passed and the Twenty-fourth Amendment, abolishing poll taxes for
voting for federal offices, was ratified, and the following year Pres.
Lyndon B. Johnson called for the implementation of comprehensive
Voting Rights Act federal legislation to protect voting rights. The resulting act, the
Voting Rights Act, suspended literacy tests, provided for federal
Pres. George W. Bush signing the
Voting Rights Act Reauthorization, approval of proposed changes to voting laws or procedures
July 2006. (“preclearance”) in jurisdictions that had previously used tests to
determine voter eligibility (these areas were covered under Sections
4 and 5 of the legislation), and directed the attorney general of the United States to challenge the use of poll taxes
for state and local elections. An expansion of the law in the 1970s also protected voting rights for non-English-
speaking U.S. citizens. Sections 4 and 5 were extended for 5 years in 1970, 7 years in 1975, and 25 years in both
1982 and 2006.
Legal challenges
The VRA resulted in a marked decrease in the voter registration disparity between white and Black people. In the
mid-1960s, for example, the overall proportion of white to Black registration in the South ranged from about 2 to
1 to 3 to 1 (and about 10 to 1 in Mississippi); by the late 1980s racial variations in voter registration had largely
disappeared. As the number of African American voters increased, so did the number of African American elected
officials. In the mid-1960s there were about 70 African American elected officials in the South, but by the turn of
the 21st century there were some 5,000, and the number of African American members of the U.S. Congress had
increased from 6 to about 40. In what was widely perceived as a test case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility
District Number One v. Holder, et al. (2009), the Supreme Court declined to rule on the constitutionality of the
VRA.
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), however, the Court struck down
the law’s Section 4—which had established a formula for identifying
jurisdictions that were required to obtain preclearance—declaring it
to be unjustified in light of changed historical circumstances. Soon
after that decision, several states formerly subject to the preclearance
requirement implemented voting restrictions that had been (or would
Shelby County v. Holder have been) blocked by the federal government, and in subsequent
years scores of similar voter-suppression measures were introduced
Charles White, field director of the
NAACP, speaking out against the in other states. Following the federal elections of 2020, which gave
Supreme Court's decision in Shelby Democrats control of the presidency and both houses of Congress,
County v. Holder to invalidate part of several Republican-controlled states adopted additional voting
the Voting Rights Act, Washington,
D.C., 2013.
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restrictions that would make voting even more difficult for racial minorities and other Democratic-leaning
constituencies.
In August 2021 the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights
Advancement Act (named for the famed civil rights leader and politician), a bill designed in part to strengthen the
VRA by updating the preclearance formula struck down in Shelby County v. Holder. The bill also addressed the
weakening of Section 2 of the VRA in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which had introduced a
novel interpretation of the law that would permit some racially discriminatory voting practices in certain
circumstances. In January 2022 Senate Republicans used the filibuster to prevent a vote by the full Senate on a
bill that consolidated the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act with another Democratic voting-reform
measure, the Freedom to Vote Act, effectively defeating both.
In October 2022 the Supreme Court heard arguments in Allen v. Milligan, a case that threatened to further weaken
Section 2 of the VRA by challenging the conclusion of a district court in Alabama that the law was likely violated
by a redistricting map that diluted the voting power of the state’s Black population. The district court’s
preliminary injunction preventing Alabama from using the map had been stayed by the Supreme Court in
February 2022 pending its own review of the case. In June 2023, by a 5–4 vote, the Court affirmed the district
court’s ruling.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Mindy Johnston.
Citation Information
Article Title: Voting Rights Act
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 28 August 2024
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/event/Voting-Rights-Act
Access Date: October 15, 2024
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