A closer look

Dismantling of the Voting Rights Act

How did the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) affect voting rights?

by Anne Valk, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

The 1965 Voting Rights Act Under Attack

In November 2021, George Kenneth (G. K. ) Butterfield, Jr., of North Carolina announced his plans to retire from the U.S. House of Representatives. His nine terms in office as a member of Congress and his decision not to run for reelection can be traced to the Voting Rights Act (VRA), both its passage in 1965 and its undermining by the Supreme Court in 2013. While growing up in the Jim Crow South, Butterfield had watched his parents and neighbors fight against restrictions on their right to vote because they were African American. Their struggle inspired Butterfield to dedicate his career to civil rights, first working as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and later as a judge. In 2004, Butterfield ran for public office and was elected to represent the First Congressional District, located in the rural northeastern part of the state. To comply with the VRA and reverse decades of disenfranchisement, North Carolina designed Butterfield’s district to concentrate the power of Black voters so that they could exert electoral influence comparable to their proportion in the state’s population.

Originally passed in 1965, the same year Butterfield graduated from high school, the VRA ensured federal government oversight of elections in places like northeastern North Carolina, where state and local officials had historically discriminated against minority voters. The heart of the VRA was a “preclearance process,” known as Section 5, through which the Department of Justice reviewed changes to election laws or procedures in those locales. For decades, the VRA prevented numerous attempts to limit voting rights. Between 1998 and 2013 alone, the Justice Department stopped about ninety proposed election law changes that it determined were discriminatory, and hundreds of additional changes were withdrawn by state and local officials before facing such scrutiny. As a result, throughout the South, by 2010 the rates at which African Americans registered and voted equaled levels of white voter turnout. Congress repeatedly reauthorized the VRA, but many Republican conservatives argued it violated states’ rights and unfairly benefited the Democratic Party, the party of choice for most voters of color. After numerous attempts to weaken the VRA, opponents succeeded in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision in the case Shelby County v. Holder invalidated key parts of the legislation (including preclearance). Part of a wave of conservative attempts to roll back voting rights, the Supreme Court's ruling immediately transformed the electoral landscape in North Carolina’s First District and in the sixteen states covered by the VRA.

Shelby County v. Holder

The case that eroded the VRA originated in 2008 when officials in Calera, Alabama, proposed new city council districts. At the time, approximately 20 percent of Calera’s voters were African American and one of its five city council seats was held by a Black official, Ernest Montgomery. The new map added more white voters to Montgomery’s district, drastically reducing the proportion of African American voters and diluting Black electoral power. Since 1975, the county had tried to pass similar measures, and the Justice Department had found them to be racially discriminatory. But in 2008, Shelby County officials argued that local elections should no longer receive federal oversight because African American residents were no longer disadvantaged when seeking to vote or run for office. The county sued U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, challenging the Section 5 preclearance requirement and attacking the necessity and constitutionality of the VRA. African American residents, including Councilman Montgomery, sought assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to protect their rights. Many Latinx, Asian American, and Native American civil rights groups also urged the court to uphold the VRA. In June 2013, the Supreme Court sided against these civil rights groups when it ruled in favor of Shelby County and accepted the argument that the preclearance section of the VRA was no longer valid.

Suppressing Voters after the Shelby Decision

With the preclearance requirement removed, many states formerly covered by the VRA quickly took action to restrict minority voting and redraw the boundaries of electoral districts. Within hours of the Shelby ruling, Texas implemented a new law requiring voters to show photo IDs and then imposed new electoral district maps (which courts later found had intentionally discriminated against African American and Latinx voters). Alabama, Mississippi, and other states also enacted laws that previously would have been blocked by the VRA: closing polling places in predominantly Black counties, shortening early voting periods, limiting how people could register, and removing hundreds of thousands of people from voter lists.

In North Carolina, the Republican-dominated legislature passed an election bill that reduced early voting, eliminated same-day voter registration and Sunday voting, and required voters to show a photo ID. Voting rights groups successfully challenged these laws by suing the state government in federal courts, a costly and time-consuming process. In a landmark 2016 ruling, a federal appeals court determined that the new law targeted African American voters with nearly “surgical precision,” since the newly imposed measures, such as the photo ID requirement, would reduce the ability of Black voters to cast their ballots.

Southern Republicans contended that these new laws made elections more secure by stopping fraud; and, on their face, the new restrictions did not single out voters on the basis of their race or party preferences. In practice, however, there was almost no evidence of the kind of voter fraud addressed by these measures, whereas these new laws intentionally disadvantaged voters of color and others who tended to vote Democratic. According to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion in the Shelby case, these “second generation” forms of discrimination aimed to make it harder for some people to participate in politics, and when they could vote, decreased the impact of their vote.

Gerrymandering to Consolidate Political Power

In addition to these attempts to discourage and restrict minority voting, politicians used redistricting, the process of changing the boundaries of election districts, to suppress opposition votes and consolidate power. Redistricting was not new: this constitutionally mandated process of drawing new district lines occurs every ten years, after each federal Census, in order to reflect population growth and shifts. And since the nineteenth century, Democrats and Republicans have attempted to consolidate power by drawing electoral districts that favor their candidates. This practice became known as partisan gerrymandering, named after an 1812 incident in which critics accused Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry of supporting an electoral map that resembled the shape of a salamander.

Under the VRA, redistricting that took race into account was legal if it would have the effect of reversing historical patterns of discrimination. For example, when the Democrat-controlled North Carolina state legislature drew new House district maps after the 1990 census, it complied with the VRA by creating two districts that would give African American voters a realistic opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Voters in Congressional District 1 elected their first African American representative in 1992 to the seat that Butterfield later held from 2004 to 2022. Because of the district’s shape, in most election years Butterfield easily defeated his Republican opponents.

But things changed in 2011 when Republicans won a majority in state government and controlled the redistricting process. Despite Democrats having more voters statewide, with new electoral maps the party struggled to win elections: in 2012, Democrats cast 50.6 percent of the votes for Congress but won only four of thirteen seats. After Shelby, lawmakers were equipped with even more ways to disadvantage African American, Latinx, students, and other dependably Democratic voters.

In North Carolina, Butterfield denounced the new election laws and district maps as a significant setback in voting rights. “Without question, North Carolina’s voting laws are now the most restrictive in the country,” he said in 2014, urging that “those whose chief goal is to maintain political power at the cost of disenfranchising thousands of North Carolinians must be stopped.” In 2021, Republicans controlled redistricting again; without the pressure of Department of Justice oversight, they diluted African Americans’ political power in the First District and erased the advantage Democrats previously held there. Consequently, Butterfield decided not to run for reelection. Despite such partisan gerrymandering, North Carolina Blacks and other minority voters maintained some hope. They remained under the protection of the 2016 federal appeals court ruling that continued to block the Tar Heel State from imposing restrictive photo ID requirements for voting, manipulating the number of days of early voting, and voiding same-day registration and Sunday voting.

Reflection Questions

How did G. K. Butterfield’s career embody the quest of African American southerners to exercise their political rights in the decades after World War II?

Why is redistricting such a partisan political process?

After the Shelby v. Holder ruling in 2013, what newly legal tactics have been used to restrict voting rights? How do these strategies compare to voting restrictions before 1965?

What was the primary justification used by the Supreme Court in ruling in favor of Shelby County in its 2013 decision? Based on the documents here, do you agree that decision was justified?

Additional Reading

Adriane Fresh, “The Effect of the Voting Rights Act on Enfranchisement: Evidence from North Carolina,” Journal of Politics 80, no. 2 (February 23, 2018): 713–18.

Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

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