District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the law on the grounds that Texas was unable to prove that SB 14 law would not discriminate against African-American and Latino voters. The Brennan Center and co-counsel represented the Texas NAACP and the Mexican American Legislative Counsel (MALC) in opposition in the case Texas v. Under Section 5 requirements, Texas filed a federal lawsuit seeking preclearance to enforce SB 14. Experts estimated that over 600,000 registered Texas voters did not have an acceptable ID under the new law. Now, voters were compelled to present an unexpired photo ID from a list of seven acceptable documents. The law greatly restricted the forms of acceptable IDs voters had to present to cast a ballot. In July 2011, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry signed SB 14 into law. Our 2018 State of Voting Report found that previously covered states have enacted a series of laws and others measures that restrict voting since Shelby County ended preclearance. A 2018 Brennan Center report concluded that previously covered states have purged voters off their rolls at a significantly higher rate than non-covered jurisdictions. The Brennan Center for Justice has consistently found that states previously covered by the preclearance requirement have engaged in recent, significant efforts to disenfranchise voters. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo ID laws that had previously been barred because of federal preclearance. Within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo ID law. The decision in Shelby County opened the floodgates to laws restricting voting throughout the United States. The ruling rendered the Section 5 preclearance system effectively inoperable. In a 5–4 decision, the Court reasoned that the coverage formula was out of date – despite Congress’s determination that it was still needed. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula in a case called Shelby County v. Preclearance was massively successful at improving voting access in covered jurisdictions. The coverage formula determined which jurisdictions had to “preclear” changes to their election rules with the federal government before implementing them, based on their history of race-based voter discrimination. Bush.Īt the center of the VRA’s success was Section 4 – commonly referred to as the coverage formula. The latest reauthorization passed both chambers of Congress with deep bipartisan support – passing unanimously in the Senate – and it was signed by George W. Based on this success, the VRA has been reauthorized multiple times-most recently, in 2006. To take just one example, in the twenty years following the law’s passage, the disparity in registration rates between white and black registration rates dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to eight just a decade later. The VRA has been among the most successful pieces of federal legislation in the history of the country. Nearly a century after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, Congress finally put teeth into its promise that no citizen could be denied the right to vote based on race. The Voting Rights Act inaugurated a new era of democracy in the United States. Advance Constitutional Change Show / hide.National Task Force on Democracy Reform & the Rule of Law.Government Targeting of Minority Communities Show / hide.Campaign Finance in the Courts Show / hide.Gerrymandering & Fair Representation Show / hide.Ensure Every American Can Vote Show / hide.
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