The Struggle Continues

For as long as voting has served as the means for voicing political opinion in the United States, control of who could and could not vote has defined our relationship to institutions of power. For African Americans especially, after a long history of disenfranchisement that included Jim Crow laws, the passage and implementation of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965—mandating unfettered access to the ballot—was the crowning legislative achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yet, for a legislative victory that has meant so much to the communities that were systematically denied the ballot, most Americans know very little about what happened to voting rights after President Johnson signed the VRA into law on August 6, 1965. The story of the VRA and the broader civil rights narrative to which it is central is often viewed as a matter of the past, a move that has obscured the law’s significance in defining the political realities of the future.

“There is a strange paradox in American society—we always talk about how important the vote is, but we continually contest the most basic of rights,” explained investigative journalist Ari Berman at a recent New America NYC event. Berman—who recently published Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America—was joined by civil rights lawyer Debo Adegbile, Counsel to the Mayor of New York City Maya Wiley, and Princeton history professor and New America fellow Julian Zelizer for a discussion about how the struggle for voting rights has evolved—but not ended—in the 21st century. 

“The Voting Rights Act was meant to enforce a law—the 15th Amendment—that already existed,” Berman said. “It was going to solve the problem once and for all.”

In Give Us The Ballot, Berman examines why that expectation did not come to pass, peeling apart the layers of history that have accumulated in the 50 years since the signing of the VRA in the hopes of explaining how the highly contested voting policies of today are the result of a long and deliberate effort to roll back the effects of the once steadfast civil rights legislation. “Congress knew when the VRA was passed that states were going to try and get around the law,” Berman noted. “It’s that five-decade resistance to the VRA that culminated in the Supreme Court we have today and the broadening attack on voting rights since the 2010 election.”

Berman attributes the widening assault on voting rights to a continually evolving “counterrevolution” among conservative politicians, writing that in the years following the passage of the VRA, conservatives adopted a political philosophy that focused on “limiting civil rights enforcement to individual cases of intentional discrimination rather than broad protection for previously marginalized and disenfranchised groups.” He identifies the culmination of these efforts as ultimately leading to the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, the conservative majority in Shelby County v. Holder found that Section 4 of the VRA—which served as a formula for determining which states with histories of voting discrimination were subject to federal scrutiny of any proposed voting changes under Section 5 of the act—was invalid because it ignored the racial progress made in those states. As a result of this decision, the states with the worst records on voting rights were effectively free to change their voting polices as they saw fit, the panelists noted.

“The idea [in the Shelby County case] was that because there had been so much progress and enfranchisement, there was this sense that it was enough,” Adegbile, who argued against discriminatory state voting laws during his time with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said. “It was a substantial blow to the heart of the Voting Rights Act.”

The Shelby ruling is only two years old, but its impact can already be felt. In Texas, nearly 800,000 voters lacked the appropriate identification required by a 2011 Voter ID law that went into effect after the Court’s decision (though the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’s law was discriminatory earlier this month). Shortly after the Shelby ruling, North Carolina passed one of the toughest voter ID laws in the nation, significantly limiting the ability of students, the elderly and minorities to easily access the ballot while also curtailing early voting and same-day voter registration (in June, the state legislature relaxed the law slightly before heading to court in July to defend its constitutionality). In his book, Berman writes that at the state and federal levels, the judicial challenges to the Voting Rights Act have produced an “electorate that was older, whiter, and more conservative than in 2008 and 2012.”

However, while Shelby County v. Holder animated a large portion of conversation, the panelists acknowledged that the ruling and the voting restrictions it facilitated were only part of the problem. “Ultimately this is a debate about the relevance of race in America,” Wiley pointed out. “The dominant [conservative] argument of color blindness—[the existence of] a post-racial society—undermines the argument that we actually need some of the affirmative steps that ensure that we are continuing to be a society that includes all people.”

Berman and Adegbile agreed with Wiley’s assertion that the anti-VRA backlash was the result of discomfort and apathy towards the still noticeable struggles of racial minorities, but the panelists stopped short of saying that racial animus was the sole factor in the assault on voting rights. “At a very basic level, there are two ways to win an election: motivate more of your people to come out and participate, or block the other candidate’s people,” Adegbile said when explaining how partisanship has also played a significant role in the push for restrictive voting policies.

Despite the difficulties of moving anything through Washington’s partisan gridlock, the panelists noted that "growing activist sensibility” within communities—most easily observed in the rhetoric and actions of organized movements like Black Lives Matter and North Carolina’s Moral Mondays—has the power to revitalize the debate on voting rights. “It is incumbent upon us to recognize the potential to connect [racial justice activism] to a range of critically important issues on inclusion, including voting rights,” Wiley noted, highlighting the particular influence that these movements can have on local politics. The other panelists echoed her optimism, but also stressed that the preservation of voting rights needed to become a larger topic of national conversation.

“As long as we have a gutted Voting Rights Act, I believe that we’re going to have a gutted democracy,” Berman said. “On the 50th anniversary of the law, it is critically important to realize that this fight didn’t end in 1965, it is still very much needed today.”