August 24, 2021

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder significantly undermined the Voting Rights Act (VRA), leaving many open to the same harmful practices that warranted its existence. Discriminatory policies have not only resurfaced in areas formerly covered by the VRA’s preclearance requirement, but also have proliferated nationwide. Since the Shelby ruling, States have introduced more than 400 state bills and enacted 30 laws that erect barriers to the ballot box for millions of Americans. State and local officials brazenly have imposed restrictive voting requirements, altered district boundaries, and shifted polling location, directly harming working families whose capacity to vote is already limited.

The John Lewis VRAA would address these disenfranchisement strategies, as well as others certain to develop. It will restore the essential portion of the VRA that blocks discriminatory voting policies before they go into effect, putting a transparent process in place for protecting everyone’s freedom to vote. It achieves this goal by establishing nationwide preclearance standards and by creating a new coverage formula for detecting repeated instances of voting rights violations in the previous 25 years.