One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

Two key US Supreme Court decisions greased the path. One was the Shelby County v. Holder decision (2013), which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prior to this ruling, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent noted, “between 1982 and 2006, DOJ objections blocked over 700 voting changes based on a determination that the changes were discriminatory.” The DOJ’s findings were reinforced during congressional hearings on the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA. There it became apparent that those proposed changes that the DOJ had denied were actually the preclearance states’ “calculated decisions to keep minority voters from fully participating in the political process.” And now that protection was gone.