Voting Rights Act gutted

The Supreme Court struck down a core component of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court struck down a core component of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week, ruling in a 5–4 vote that Congress can no longer require nine mostly Southern states to get federal approval before changing their voting procedures. Under the act, a keystone of civil-rights-era legislation, jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination had been required to have any change in their election laws or practices pre-cleared by the federal government. While the court left that requirement in place, it rendered it essentially obsolete by ruling that the provisions that identify which jurisdictions the law covered were out of date. Congress “re-enacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no relationship to the present day” when it renewed the law in 2006, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority. “Our country has changed.”

In response to the judgment, Texas and Mississippi vowed to immediately implement voter identification laws that had been subject to federal approval. President Obama declared himself “deeply disappointed” by the ruling, which he said “upsets decades of well-established practices to help make sure voting is fair.”

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