What was the outcome in the Supreme Courts 2013 ruling on the Voting Rights Act quizlet?

Seven years ago today, the supreme court issued one of the most consequential rulings in a generation in a case called Shelby county v Holder. In a 5-4 vote, the court struck down a formula at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that required certain states and localities with a history of discrimination against minority voters to get changes cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this decision. The power of the Voting Rights Act was in the design that the supreme court gutted – discriminatory voting policies could be blocked before they harmed voters. The law placed the burden of proof on government officials to prove why the changes they were seeking were not discriminatory. Now, voters who are discriminated against now bear the burden of proving they are disenfranchised.

Immediately after the decision, Republican lawmakers in Texas and North Carolina – two states previously covered by the law – moved to enact new voter ID laws and other restrictions. A federal court would later strike down the North Carolina law, writing it was designed to target African Americans “with almost surgical precision”.

“The scope of what, frankly, the right could do, in a pre-Shelby world was very limited. Now it’s not so limited,” said Bryan Sells, a voting rights attorney in Georgia. “If I’m a Republican political consultant or strategist, the options that are available to me are now wider than they used to be… It made it more advantageous to tinker.”

We may never know the full impact of the Shelby county decision. While statewide voting changes get a lot of attention, most of the voting changes the justice department reviewed were submitted by local jurisdictions. Now it’s much harder to even hear about those local changes – which include polling place closures or changing the way candidates are elected – let alone stop them, said Deuel Ross, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) who frequently challenges voting changes in the south.

“Unless someone happens to know to call LDF or the ACLU or someone else and flags that for them, and we happen to have the resources to bring that litigation, nothing ever happens,” he said. “There’s so many things that I think slip through the cracks and have a real impact on Black representation,” he said.

The supreme court’s decision didn’t get rid of the Voting Rights Act entirely. Congress could restore the full power of the law by coming up with a new formula to determine which places need to submit their voting changes for pre-clearance. But since 2013, that hasn’t happened. House Democrats passed a new formula late last year, but Republicans in the senate have refused to take the measure up.

Here are some ways voting rights have been stripped since 2013:

Polling place closures

Between 2012 and 2018, there were 1,688 polling place closures in states previously covered by section five of the Voting Rights Act, according to a report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Before the Shelby county decision, local officials would have had to submit these changes for federal review and show they were not discriminatory. Now, local officials are free to make those changes under the radar without analyzing the discriminatory impact of the closures

Two hundred and fourteen of those closures were in Georgia, a state previously covered by the Voting Rights Act that is emerging as a political battleground. In 2015, Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s top election official, sent local election officials a memo outlining justifications for closing the polls and reminding them they no longer had to submit the changes for review to the federal government.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes to polling places in Georgia that either would have been stopped under section five or slowed down,” Sells said.

Polling place closures again came into sharp focus this month as voters faced long lines during the state’s primary. Local election officials, facing a shortage of polling locations and poll workers, consolidated polling locations for the primary.

“We could rest a lot easier if in a non-Shelby world if whatever changes were going to be more implemented as a result of the virus would not weigh more heavily on minority voters than they would on whites,” Sells said. “Now, in this kind of world we can’t have any level of trust that what election officials are doing isn’t politically motivated.”

Voter ID laws

Voter ID laws have long been found to disenfranchise people of color and marginalized communities, who are less likely to have the kinds of IDs states require to vote.

After the Shelby decision, Texas Republicans resurrected SB 14 – a strict voter ID bill that required that voters show one of a handful of government issued IDs to vote. Before Shelby, the justice department refused to approve the law, but after the decision, Texas announced the law would “immediately” be in effect. Years later, the law was found to be discriminatory against Black and Latinx communities, and struck down again. But eventually lawmakers created a new version of the bill, SB 5, with minor adjustments, which passed in 2017.

Meanwhile, Alabama enforced a law requiring photo ID starting in 2014, as did Mississippi. In North Carolina, the state where a federal court previously blocked a voter ID law, Republicans are pushing a new voter ID law that has been blocked thus far. In every state concerned, civil rights advocates have pointed out that Black and Latinx voters were more likely not to have a government issued photo ID.

Proof of citizenship

In 2013, Arizona Republicans implemented a new system requiring residents to show proof of US citizenship in local and state elections – a controversial restriction lambasted by civil rights advocates. The supreme court had decided earlier that year that Arizona, a state previously covered by the Voting Rights Act, could not require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, but Arizona’s attorney general and secretary of state said they could still require it for state and local elections. Now, Arizona provides separate ballots for presidential races and state elections – requiring a dual registration process that critics say depresses voter turnout, especially in Native American and minority communities.

Requiring proof of citizenship to vote, however, is an increasingly popular stance for Republican lawmakers. Last year, Texas attempted to question the citizenship status of 100,000 registered voters, before admitting its claim was based on false data. In Alabama and Georgia there have been citizenship proof laws passed before the Shelby county decision, but neither state is currently implementing them. Federal courts have also blocked a Kansas law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The measure was estimated to have affected 30,000 people.

Meanwhile, it is very rare that a non-citizens attempt to vote in the US, according to the Brennan Center, and sometimes they are registered by accident. But requiring proof of citizenship can backfire for US citizens, especially those who live in mixed immigration status households, or those who, similar to photo IDs, lack the proper documentation.

The 2020 election will be just the second presidential contest since 1965 where the Voting Rights Act isn’t in full effect. Writing for the supreme court in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts said that voting discrimination was no longer as severe as it was when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965. But the mounting evidence in the years since the decision have shown that just isn’t the case – the law may be needed now more than ever.

“Throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent for the court.

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