And like its sister act in 1964, the 1965 VRA was truly landmark. Rather than waiting for locales to violate voting rights and for people to make formal complaints, the VRA put the responsibility for obeying the Constitution onto state and local governments. The Voting Rights Act, as Michael Waldman so aptly put it in The Fight to Vote, “thrust the federal government into the role of supervising voting in large parts of the country to protect African Americans’ right to vote, a duty it had not assumed since Reconstruction.”
