The Shelby County v. Holder decision thus gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which locales came under federal oversight. With that, GOP-led states, as if this were Alabama in the early 1980s, asserted that it was actually voter fraud, not voter suppression, that required the full machinery of government to eradicate.173 Therefore, 2016 was the first federal election in fifty years held without the protection of the Voting Rights Act.
