voting rights act
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Report: 868 Fewer Places for People of Color to Cast Ballots in 2016 Election
Tuesday’s election is the first since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act three years ago in Shelby County v. Holder, and according to a study published Friday, 868 polling places that served mostly people of color have been closed in that time. “The Great Poll Closure” (pdf), a study published by the…
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Watch: Attorney General Loretta Lynch Discusses Federal Election Monitors for 2016 Race
In a climate where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has asked his supporters to “monitor” elections and has repeatedly called the system “rigged,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch this week released a video discussing this year’s elections and how the federal government will play a part in monitoring them. Considering that this is the first presidential contest…
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Huge Win for Voting Rights as Appeals Court Strikes Down NC’s ID Law
In a major victory for voting rights, a federal appeals court struck down North Carolina’s stringent requirement that voters show identification before casting ballots, and also reinstated an additional week of early voting, the Washington Post reports. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit came to the decision Friday, vindicating…
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3 Years Later, the Ghosts of Shelby Still Haunt Us
Three years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a crushing ruling in the landmark case Shelby v. Holder (pdf). For reasons still mostly unclear to me (Chief Justice John Roberts partially opined that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act were “extraordinary measures” no longer needed because America’s legacy on race “had changed”), Section 5 of the…