One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

Thus, when NAMUDNO v. Holder was decided in 2009, years of doubt about the Voting Rights Act, years of questioning whether racism existed anymore, came to a boil. “Since 1982,” Roberts wrote in his decision, “only 17 jurisdictions—out of the more than 12,000 covered political subdivisions—have successfully bailed out of the Act.” That only seventeen had been able to prove they no longer discriminated against their minority populations’ voting rights and thus no longer needed federal oversight seemed absurd to Roberts. He, of course, did not reckon with the fact that places in Georgia and Alabama such as Pickens County, Perry County, Rome, and others had repeatedly tried to disfranchise American citizens despite the Fifteenth Amendment, and that is the reason only seventeen jurisdictions had been released from scrutiny in more than four decades. Instead, came the court’s warning shot: seventeen was not enough. “It is unlikely that Congress intended the provision to have such limited effect.”