Explainer: The Voting Rights Act of 1965

An Overview

The Constitution sets the criteria for congressional elections to the House & Senate in Article I and does the same for presidential elections in Article II. Several of the subsequent amendments to the Constitution also deal with elections & voting rights:

• The 12th Amendment modified the Electoral College process that selects the president and vice president.
• The 14th Amendment specified how seats are apportioned in the federal House of Representatives, and it contains the Equal Protection Clause ― which is the basis for many voting rights claims.
• The 15th Amendment prohibited race-based voter disenfranchisement.
• The 19th Amendment prohibited sex-based voter disenfranchisement.
• The 23rd Amendment provided the District of Columbia with votes in the Electoral College.
• The 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes in federal elections.
• The 26th Amendment granted 18-year-olds voting rights.

The federal government is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws through the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and Dept. of Justice (DOJ), voting rights through the DOJ, and addressing qualifications and contested elections, which fall to the House & Senate.

State governments have broad responsibility for administering elections, including areas such as managing voting, determining voting methods & acquiring equipment, determining eligibility & identification requirements for voters (in compliance with federal law), and securing election systems. State governments receive a degree of assistance in carrying out those responsibilities from certain federal agencies:

• State governments are responsible for election administration. They receive assistance from the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) & the DOJ for things such as facilitating ballot access for Americans overseas or receiving grants to upgrade voting equipment.
• State governments are responsible for election security. They receive assistance from the DOJ & the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) in responding to threats to elections that are beyond their capability to protect against.
• State legislatures are responsible for redistricting. They receive assistance from the Dept. of Commerce, which provides Census data used in the redistricting process, and the DOJ, which enforces protections against voter discrimination.

What is the Voting Rights Act?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to guarantee the rights of racial minority groups, particularly Black Americans. Despite the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 prohibiting race-based voter discrimination, many southern states implemented laws to systematically disenfranchise Black people starting in 1890 in the post-Reconstruction South. These laws took on several forms:

• Poll taxes required voters to pay a tax (usually several dollars) in order to cast their ballot.
• Literacy tests required voters to prove their ability to read, understand, or interpret a document, such as the state constitution, in order to vote.
• Grandfather clauses exempted voters from poll taxes and/or literacy tests if their father or grandfather had been on voter registration lists during the Reconstruction era.
• Old soldier clauses provided individuals who served in the Civil War or other specified wars an exemption from poll taxes & literacy tests or provided an alternative to the test.

The Jim Crow era saw the enactment of laws requiring the segregation of Black and white people in society, which worked to further diminish voter registration & electoral participation by Black residents in the South. When grandfather clauses were ruled unconstitutional in 1915, states turned to “white primary” elections, which barred Black communities from participating in Democratic Party primary elections. Those primaries essentially functioned as general elections because of the Republican Party’s decline in the South after Reconstruction, as Black voter participation was impeded.

This continued despite the outgrowth of the civil rights movement in the mid-20th Century and the enactment of laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (after the longest filibuster in the Senate’s history) that were intended to eliminate voter discrimination. The turning point came at the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama in 1965, which was a response to the violent and sometimes deadly resistance Black voter registration efforts in the South had been met with. After President Lyndon B. Johnson mobilized the National Guard to protect the marchers from violent counter-protests, he delivered a televised speech to announce he would send Congress a bill to prohibit voter disenfranchisement.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was LBJ’s second major civil rights bill, following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the VRA was intended to enforce the 15th Amendment. It allowed for direct federal efforts to increase Black voter registration in areas where it was suppressed and prohibited the use of practices like poll taxes and literacy tests by states in an effort to restrict voting. It also required areas with historic voter discrimination to seek the DOJ’s preclearance of proposed new voting laws before they could be implemented to ensure they wouldn’t disenfranchise. Black voter turnout in the South increased in the years that followed and caught up with Black voter registration in the rest of the U.S. by the 1992 presidential election.

The preclearance provisions of the VRA were reauthorized by Congress in 2006, but they were partially struck down by the Supreme Court in a 2013 decision known as Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder. The Court found that the formula used in the VRA ― which was based on voting patterns from 1964, 1968, and 1972 ― was outdated and no longer “grounded in current conditions,” infringing on states’ rights as a result. The Supreme Court left the preclearance provisions intact but dormant, pending the adoption of a new formula by Congress, which hasn’t occurred as of 2020.