The Voting Rights Act had a roller-coaster year in the courts in 2023, and legal challenges to the landmark law are set to continue this year.
In ongoing redistricting lawsuits mainly across the South, Republican state officials have been raising novel arguments that threaten to erode a key set of protections against racial discrimination in the election process.
While critics have been challenging what the Justice Department has called “the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress” since shortly after it was first enacted in 1965, many voting rights experts say the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority has inspired new legal strategies.
“Conservative legal activist groups are trying out a variety of pretty radical claims that would have been beyond the pale 10, 15, 20 years ago,” says Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who wrote Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act. “But now that there’s this very conservative majority, they think, ‘Why not? Let’s give it a shot.’ And they’re hoping that some of these sets of claims will stick.”
One legal tack by Alabama Republicans, however, was rebuffed at the country’s highest court in 2023.
Going against decades of precedent, state officials argued in last year’s most high-profile case about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that race should not be taken into account when maps of voting districts are redrawn unless there’s evidence of intentional discrimination. But two of the high court’s conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh…
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