Politico: The Supreme Court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act for 9 years. This case could be the next blow.

06.27.2022 / By ZACH MONTELLARO
Politico: The Supreme Court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act for 9 years. This case could be the next blow.

Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director at the good government group Common Cause, compared preclearance to the ability to prevent a repeat arson. “But unfortunately, with Shelby County, we have to allow a building to burn down before we can go and seek some kind of justice and by then the harm has already happened,” she said.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been slowly whittled away over the last decade by the Supreme Court — and a case set to be heard in the fall could shrink the protections offered by the law to the smallest level yet.

The redistricting cycle preceding this year’s elections was the first in 50 years to take place without “preclearance” requirements under the law — a pillar of the Voting Rights Act as originally written, in which states with histories of discriminatory voting practices had to have new election laws or practices reviewed by a federal court or the Department of Justice. Chief Justice John Roberts ruled for a divided Supreme Court nine years ago, in Shelby County v. Holder, to strike down the part of the VRA that determined which states and counties were subject to preclearance.

Now, a still-more conservative Court will hear arguments in the fall about Alabama’s redistricting, in a case targeting the other central piece of the Voting Rights Act: Section 2, which prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate on the basis of race. The result of the case could make it more difficult for minority communities to claim new election laws are discriminatory — and raise the bar for what has to happen to get relief from the courts.

The overall effect, civil rights groups and voting rights attorneys say, has been to shift from preemptive checks on election laws to after-the-fact challenges — cases that are harder to win and also see the legal burden shift to those affected by the laws.

Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director at the good government group Common Cause, compared preclearance to the ability to prevent a repeat arson. “But unfortunately, with Shelby County, we have to allow a building to burn down before we can go and seek some kind of justice and by then the harm has already happened,” she said.

See More: Abuse of PowerGerrymandering/RedistrictingVoting Rights