Khadidah Stone will never forget the day in 2023 she learned that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld voting rights in her home state of Alabama.
She was in a store when her phone buzzed, flooded with messages. “I was standing in the aisle crying,” she recalled. “And the guy at the front of the store was like, ‘Ma’am, are you OK?’”
Stone, 28, was one of the plaintiffs in Allen v. Milligan, arguing that Alabama needed two majority-Black congressional districts to accurately reflect its Black voter population. The court agreed, deciding that a map with one majority-Black district likely violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.
“I cried because I was like, ‘Dang, there’s hope,’” Stone, the director of network capacity at Alabama Forward, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization, told Capital B. “To be honest, I didn’t think that we would win because I knew that this was the John Roberts Court, that it was leaning conservative.”
The Montgomery native’s advocacy journey began at the age of 13, when her father was sentenced to 60 years in prison for selling marijuana. She became determined to learn about criminal justice, she said. And eventually, this interest prompted her to think about other freedoms — including voting rights in Alabama.
But Stone’s joy has now evaporated. In the years since that courtroom victory, the future of the Voting Rights Act has appeared increasingly uncertain, as litigation threatens key provisions of the most important federal statute protecting the right to vote. Six decades after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, advocates say, it’s hanging by a thread.
Alabama Republicans in June appealed the yearslong redistricting battle to the Supreme Court. They hope to convince the court’s conservative justices to scale back the protections that a section of the Voting Rights Act provides against dilution in the map-drawing process.
This was only a few weeks before the court punted a decision in Louisiana v. Callais — a high-profile case that concerns this same section and a controversial congressional map — to next term. Some legal scholars worry that the court might use the case to further erode the Voting Rights Act.
Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, told Capital B that this section is the “last leg” that the Voting Rights Act is standing on.
“The decision in Allen v. Milligan should be controlling,” she said. “It’s a problem that the court has taken up [the Louisiana case]. This very clearly signals that it’s not bound by its own precedents, even precedents issued two years ago.”
U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Dick Durbin of Illinois in July reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would bolster aspects of the 1965 law that have been weakened in recent years.
As supporters prepare to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, here’s what to know about the status of its most significant sections and the ongoing challenges to Black access to the ballot box.
Heart of the Voting Rights Act
When Congress was crafting the Voting Rights Act, it decided that certain states — particularly those across the South with histories of discriminating against Black voters — would need the federal government’s approval before they could change their election laws.
Section 5 was the enforcement mechanism that empowered the federal government to block potentially harmful state legislation through “preclearance.”
How the section has worked over the decades: It was extremely effective, and blocked restrictive voter ID legislation, unrepresentative redistricting maps, and more. Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice introduced approximately 1,000 objections to changes proposed by states, according to a ProPublica analysis.
How the section works today: In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court sapped much of the power of the section when it eliminated the preclearance requirement. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that racial disparity in voting in the covered jurisdictions was “compelling evidence justifying the preclearance remedy” in the past, but that “there is no longer such a disparity.”
It was Roberts’ opinion that made Stone, the Alabama advocate, skeptical that the court might uphold other sections of the Voting Rights Act.
In the decision, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered a dissenting opinion, arguing that the noticeable improvements in access to the ballot box were rooted in preclearance. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” she argued, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Within months of the decision, previously covered states began to pass restrictive voting measures.
Some observers say that it seemed as if Roberts supported Ginsburg’s assertion about the necessity of this section: He included a table in his opinion. The table compares voter registration numbers from 1965 with those from 2004, illuminating how dramatically racial gaps in voter registration declined during this period.
Enforcing Reconstruction-era protections
Ratified in 1870 — as the last of the Reconstruction Amendments — the 15th Amendment guarantees that the right to vote can’t be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Another section of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2, helps to enforce this mandate through a wide range of protections. Some of these protections include allowing people to bring “vote dilution” claims and “vote deprivation” claims.
How the section has worked over the decades: Vote dilution often involves disputes over redistricting. This includes efforts to weaken Black voters’ influence by “packing” them into as few districts as possible or “cracking” or spreading them across a number of districts, advocates say, pointing to the country’s brewing redistricting fight. Vote deprivation might entail claims that it’s racially discriminatory to tie casting a ballot to showing a form of identification that Black voters are less likely to have.
How the section works today: Since the Supreme Court hollowed out Section 5 in 2013, Section 2 has grown in importance for those seeking to challenge laws and maps that might discriminate “in purpose or impact.” It was this section that the court upheld in 2023 in the Alabama decision that stunned many court watchers who were familiar with Roberts’ well-documented opposition to the Voting Rights Act.
But cases out of Alabama, Louisiana, and North Dakota could threaten the future of this section of the Voting Rights Act. One argument some are pursuing is that individual citizens and groups such as the NAACP can’t bring litigation enforcing the section because they’re not explicitly named in the Voting Rights Act. Only the Justice Department, the argument goes, has that authority.
The general concept of individual citizens and groups suing based on an alleged violation of a law, known as the “private right of action,” is in some ways the “only game in town” when it comes to voting rights litigation, according to Murray, the law professor at NYU.
“States enacting suppressive voter laws aren’t likely to challenge themselves,” she said. “And this Justice Department is unlikely to raise challenges to suppressive voter laws.”
Other efforts to restrict voting rights
The U.S. House of Representatives in April passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The bill is a major Republican priority and would require people to show in-person proof of U.S. citizenship — for instance, a passport or birth certificate — in order to register for federal elections. To overcome a filibuster and pass the U.S. Senate, the bill would need Democratic support.
Advocates fear that the bill could lock millions of Americans out of the franchise, including older Black Americans who never received birth certificates because of discriminatory policies and women who changed their names after getting married or divorced.
“The SAVE Act erects a discriminatory barrier to the ballot while pretending to ‘solve’ a problem that does not exist,” Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in an April statement.
“It’s a misnomer to call this bill the SAVE Act when it would cause nothing but harm to Black communities, rural communities, and so many others who would be stripped of their right to vote if it becomes law,” she added.
Taiwan Scott, an individual plaintiff in a crucial 2024 Supreme Court case involving South Carolina’s congressional map, echoed this frustration with lawmakers.
A champion of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Scott, 49, has long called on lawmakers to draw a map that isn’t a partisan gerrymander so that Black South Carolinians, who primarily vote Democratic, have a fair shot at electing a representative of their choice.
After 2013’s Shelby County decision, lawmakers in South Carolina didn’t have to receive federal approval before their 2022 congressional map could go into effect. The map left Black South Carolinians, including Gullah Geechee people who want their representatives to do more to protect their land from climate and development challenges, vulnerable.
“Congress designated this corridor to us, but then you have representatives who aren’t addressing our concerns, such as heirs’ property and generational land,” Scott told Capital B. “It boils down to: Who’s listening? And how can we put more pressure on representatives to be our voice, or find other ways to protect our right to vote?”
For some, the answer has been to enact state-level Voting Rights Acts that can bring back protections that have been lost through the chipping away of federal legislation. In May, Colorado became the eighth state to adopt such legislation.
The seven other states are Minnesota in 2024, Connecticut in 2023, New York in 2022, Virginia in 2021, Oregon in 2019, Washington in 2018, and California in 2002. Advocates are pushing for similar legislation in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey.
Sixty years after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, advocates want everyone to remember its full history — from the rocky period before its passage to its uncertain future.
“If we don’t know our history, we don’t know nothing,” said Stone, the Alabama advocate, stressing that the voting rights of many marginalized groups — not only Black Americans — are at risk. “Especially if you aren’t a white man, you need to be putting yourself on the line fighting for voting rights just as much as anybody else.”
