“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, and Rome had repeatedly tried to disenfranchise American citizens despite the Fifteenth Amendment, and that is the reason
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