Supreme Court Likely To Strike Down Key Voting Rights Provision By June: What That Means For Black Voters

The United States Supreme Court is poised to rule on one of the most consequential voting rights issues brought before the nation’s highest court in decades: Whether or not the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s Section 2 is Constitutional.

It’s a huge decision with implications that could impact what it means to vote for generations while also altering the balance of power all the way from city halls to state legislatures to the halls of Congress.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which passed in 1965, was designed to ensure that Black voters would have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice by prohibiting states from using redistricting guidelines based on racial demographics.

Gerrymandering, the practice of designating district maps that typically occurs after a census count every 10 years, is Constitutional. A party can organize district lines based on political considerations, but not racial ones, the court has maintained.

But that could change if the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has its way. And the court’s right wing members, who hold a 6-3 advantage over their liberal counterparts, have signaled they are ready to act.

Conservatives have claimed Section 2 unfairly puts race into the equation by mandating that Black voters have automatic opportunities to elect Black candidates to offices across the country solely because of race. They claim this practice serves as a quota that itself uses race to disadvantage some racial groups in favor of another group.

But what conservatives don’t mention is the VRA’s Section 2 aimed to correct an egregious wrong and in 1965, the same year Black citizens were chased down and brutalized while peacefully crossing Alabama’s Edmund Pettis Bridge, many Black voters could not even safely cast a ballot, let alone elect someone to Congress. Slavery ended 100 years before the Act’s passage, but throughout that time, most Black Americans still did not have a guaranteed right to cast a ballot.

Brutal and sometimes deadly opposition to Blacks being able to cast a ballot featured a litany of state=level actions designed to severely restrict or eliminate the weight of Black voter participation, ranging from poll taxes to literacy tests to felon disenfranchisement laws and more. America did not elect its first Black mayor until after the Act was passed, a signal of how fractured Black voting power under years of resistance to it had become.

Striking down Section 2 is likely to actually reinstate a de facto Jim Crow-ism into voting, many voter law experts warn, allowing the redrawing of districts that won’t take Black voters into consideration, opening the door to a significant number of Black elected leaders being pushed into districts where they will not win and where their voters will have limited opportunity to vote their preference.

The end result: Likely a lot fewer Black faces in power. And potentially a disinterested Black voting public with less ability for Black voters to elect folks who understand their concerns and who can represent those concerns in the halls of power.

This possibility is all the more concerning when the current political climate is taken into account: Congress is angling to pass the SAVE America Act, which will require additional forms of verification at the polling place. While polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans believe a form of ID requirement is a common sense ask when casting a ballot, voting rights advocates say the SAVE Act, if passed, could lead to broad voter disenfranchisement since many voters do not carry a birth certificate around with them and a name change such as after marriage could lead to complications at the time and place of voting.

Last week, the Republican=controlled Georgia legislature passed HB 369, a bill that will make countywide elections nonpartisan. If it becomes law, which is likely, only the 5 counties with the highest numbers of Black voters will be impacted: Fulton; Dekalb;Clayton, Gwinnett and Cobb.