WILMINGTON, Delaware — Wearing his Sunday best, Corey Gordon Jr. drove 30 minutes to Shiloh Baptist Church in Wilmington, Delaware, to witness a historic event that would impact his fundamental right to vote.
The 22-year-old graduate of the University of Delaware saw firsthand how anti-diversity backlash could unsettle a campus. Over the past year, the school sparked controversy when it temporarily removed research documenting its ties to slavery and asked organizations that focus on diversity to take down their posters.
So when the former president of the university’s NAACP chapter learned that Delaware was preparing to enact legislation to protect Black voting rights in the state, the move felt like a refreshing reversal. He had to be at the first Black Baptist church in the state.
“It’s really important to have guardrails in case things get worse before they get better,” Gordon told Capital B.
On Thursday — the 61st anniversary of the federal Voting Rights Act — Gordon sat in the pews to watch Gov. Matt Meyer sign the Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act. It establishes legal protections against voter intimidation, allows voters and civil rights organizations to challenge vote dilution in state court, and directs courts to interpret election laws in ways that favor expanding access to the ballot box, among other changes.
Under the new law, Black Delawareans and other minority groups enjoy protections they can turn to if they believe that election rules or voting maps discriminate on the basis of race even as the U.S. Supreme Court further restricts federal protections. The bill also passed the Delaware General Assembly with a level of bipartisan support that’s rare in today’s political landscape. Advocates hope that what’s happening in Delaware might inspire movement-building everywhere, including in former Jim Crow states.
“We’re not going to let Delaware go back to an era where decisions are made by only one group of people,” Delaware House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown said at the bill signing, her remarks drawing amens and affirmations from the advocates, faith leaders, and community members in the pews. “We’re actively writing a new chapter in the story for Delaware — not only for Delaware, but we’re setting the tone for the rest of the country.”
Applause erupted after the Democratic governor, who encouraged everyone to take the energy in the room and carry it forward, signed the bill, ushering in a new day for the First State. It takes effect on July 1, 2027, giving the state time to prepare for the changes.
Delaware now joins New Jersey, Maryland, Colorado, Minnesota, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, Oregon, Washington, and California in enacting a state Voting Rights Act. In June, the Michigan state Senate passed its own Voting Rights Act, sending it to the state House.
For Black Delawareans — who make up roughly a quarter of the state’s population, one of the highest shares in the country — the state’s legislative action is significant.
Andrew Bernstein, civic engagement counsel at the ACLU of Delaware, which has been a primary supporter of the state’s Voting Rights Act, told Capital B that racial disparities in voting persist across Delaware, especially in local elections.
The new law highlights those gaps. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2024, 80.2% of white Delawareans were registered to vote, compared with 65.7% of Black Delawareans. And of registered voters, 73.5% of white residents cast ballots, compared with 60.5% of Black residents.
“We see this legislation as a way to ensure that at least those minimum standards are still respected, such that Delawareans can feel that the progress that’s been made will continue to be safeguarded when it comes to racial participation and representation,” Bernstein said.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, the first Black American to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate, emphasized the significance she sees in what her state is doing in light of the ongoing erosion of voting rights.
“With each disenfranchising move, Black and brown communities lose representation in our democracy,” she told Capital B. “The Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act demonstrates a recommitment to our progress and promises Black communities in Delaware that our democracy works for them, too. While Republicans in Washington stonewall our efforts to restore voting rights at the federal level, states need to continue stepping up in the fight for fair maps and political representation.”
Blunt Rochester’s invocation of democracy underscores that Black Delawareans were long denied its full promise. The state officially remained in the Union during the Civil War, but it was also a slave state whose lawmakers refused to ratify the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments — which respectively ended slavery, granted citizenship and equal protection of the law to all people born in the U.S., and extended voting rights to Black men — when they were first proposed. The legislature only ratified the amendments symbolically decades later.
For Blunt Rochester, this history is also deeply personal. She often carries a scarf with her. Printed on it is a copy of the 1867 voter registration record of her great-great-great-grandfather, an enslaved man in Georgia who signed the document with an “X” because he could neither read nor write.
That scarf has become a reminder of how hard-fought Black political participation has been in the U.S. — and why, the Democrat believes, states such as Delaware have a responsibility to protect it as federal voting rights safeguards continue to erode.
A national blueprint for voting rights?
Supporters argue that Delaware’s Voting Rights Act matters beyond the state’s borders. At a moment when voting rights legislation has become a highly polarizing issue — with Democrats broadly for it and Republicans against it — Delaware is charting a different course, they say, one worthy of emulating.
Bernstein pointed out that, unlike many recent state Voting Rights Acts, which have largely advanced along party-line votes, Delaware’s new law enjoyed bipartisan support, including a unanimous vote in the state Senate. It also had a Republican co-sponsor in the upper chamber: state Sen. Bryant L. Richardson.
“Both parties agreed on the fundamental importance of elections and how crucial it is to keep them free of discrimination,” Bernstein said. “In today’s climate, that consensus, especially on an election-related issue, showed that reaching this kind of bipartisanship shouldn’t be a problem — that voting rights should be beyond partisanship, especially when it comes to combating discrimination in elections.”
For Rita Paige, a 66-year-old Dover resident who has spent decades organizing around civil rights issues in Delaware, the law’s significance extends beyond abstract policy. She said that Black Delawareans will be better positioned to protect their political voice and champion their communities, whether by opposing polling-place closures, fighting voter intimidation, or challenging discriminatory maps.
“Our vote is our voice,” Paige told Capital B. “It shows that we’re being seen as 100% human — not as three-fifths human.” During her remarks at the bill signing Thursday, she explained that when the federal government further dismantled protections, Delaware “answered with the power of state law and said, ‘Not here, not now, not ever.’”
Christina Das, policy counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, which has been one of the primary drafters of state Voting Rights Acts nationwide, told Capital B that it shouldn’t be remarkable that there was deep bipartisan support for Delaware’s bill. What’s remarkable, to her, is that this is even news, because polling by the Legal Defense Fund shows that strong support for state Voting Rights Acts transcends partisanship and demographics.
“It’s imperative that legislators across the country see Delaware’s leadership as motivation when they go back into session,” Das said. “This should be a rallying cry for them to take more action to protect Black voters by enacting state Voting Rights Acts in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais.”
Supporters maintain that Delaware’s law could resonate in another way, too.
Michael Pernick, a senior counsel who co-leads the Legal Defense Fund’s state Voting Rights Act team, said that similar legislation has also been introduced in some Southern states. Even though those proposals rarely advance through the legislative process, they’ve become vital organizing tools, he explained.
Rather than focusing only on whether a bill is signed into law, Pernick said, advocates in former slaveholding states — where Black voter turnout has increased since the Supreme Court’s April decision — have used the proposals to create a kind of voting rights road map.
“They’ve become tools to educate and engage and empower voters,” Pernick told Capital B. For organizers across the South, he added, the proposals provide “a vision and something to fight for,” despite the fact that advocates don’t expect them “to pass tomorrow.”
Gordon knows that Delaware — which he describes as “as north as the South gets,” but also as a place where the culture transforms noticeably south of Wilmington — can’t reverse the Supreme Court’s April decision. But he hopes that Delaware’s example will encourage other states to begin establishing their own voting rights protections.
“We don’t know what the next Supreme Court decision will be,” Gordon said. “So it’s really important to be proactive.”
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