We Now Know Just How Devastating the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Rulings Were

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On June 25, 2013, the Roberts Court handed down their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s “preclearance” condition, which required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to get permission from the federal government before they could change any policy related to their elections. The country had changed dramatically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; the “strong medicine” of the Voting Rights Act, he argued, was no longer needed, let alone justified. But Michael G. Miller and I show throughout our new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built – and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act just how misguided that reasoning was. In the parts of the country freed from preclearance by Shelby County, our electoral institutions have grown demonstrably less open to Americans of color.

When Mike and I started working on what would become An American Problem, a promise made by Justice Roberts in Shelby County still held. “Section 2” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he wrote — the section containing the tools allowing litigators to attack election laws and policies that disproportionately harmed voters of color ± “is permanent and applies nationwide.” Although the Shelby County majority was happy to invalidate the preclearance regime that June morning, they told the country that tools remained still for removing discriminatory laws from the statute books.

But this is no longer the case.

In this excerpt from the book’s introduction, Mike and I discuss not only the negative impacts that Shelby County has had for voters of color, but also the continued attacks on what remained of the Voting Rights Act’s litigation tools; Section 2 was largely nullified in the Court’s decisions in Brnovich v. DNC and Louisiana v. Callais. As we head into the 2026 midterms, the country will be without a federal statute capable of invalidating discriminatory voting maps policies, everywhere from the smallest school board in rural Wisconsin to the nation’s largest states.

Voting rights activists often referred to Sections 5 and 2 as the “shield” and the “sword.” Section 5’s preclearance condition blocked thousands of discriminatory policies before they could go into effect; Section 2 could strike down such policies that made it into law. But today, the shield is broken and the sword is dulled.

By any measure the Voting Rights Act was tremendously successful. Throughout the states of the former Confederacy, registration rates among Black voters surged nearly 20 percentage points in just three years, with the largest effects concentrated among the most egregious pre-VRA offenders. In Mississippi, for instance, Black voter registration swelled to roughly 60% in 1968—up nearly ten times from the pre-VRA rate of just 6.7%. In real terms, the VRA allowed more than a million Black Southerners to register and vote for the first time. Black participation in elections grew over the subsequent decades, reaching parity with white voters in 2008, when the first Black president was elected. Over the second half of the twentieth century, Congress extended the VRA’s protections to other groups, eventually also protecting linguistic minorities as well. All the while, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the federal judiciary maintained their vigilance over jurisdictions “covered” by the VRA’s preclearance provisions, stopping laws whose effects were unlikely to be race neutral. This ongoing preclearance process was the linchpin of the VRA, allowing the federal government to ensure equal ballot access for all Americans. Until, suddenly, it was gone.

On June 25, 2013, by a 5–4 vote in Shelby County v. Holder (570 U.S. 529, 2013), the United States Supreme Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act. That section contained the coverage formula that determined which parts of the country would be subject to the preclearance power of Section 5. The Supreme Court ruled that the coverage formula, conceived at the height of Southern efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, was antiquated and no longer reflected the covered jurisdictions’ willingness to discriminate. The hypothetical federal preclearance power was left intact, but the list of jurisdictions required to preclear all their election changes was eliminated. The decision therefore effectively ended preclearance as well: If no jurisdictions were required to submit their laws for federal review, there was nothing DOJ examiners could do to stop problematic changes before they went into effect.

In the wake of Shelby County, jurisdictions that formerly had to secure federal consent before changing election policies—comprising hundreds of counties across all or part of fifteen states—are free to do whatever they wish, constrained only by the threat of lawsuits. Stripped of the extraordinary power of Section 5, advocacy groups and the DOJ once again find themselves in a pre-1965 world in which litigation serves as the sole method of striking down policies that deny voters of color equal access to the ballot box. But even Section 2 of the VRA, which protects against discriminatory election policies nationwide and under which much of this litigation is brought, has been weakened in recent years. In 2024, for instance, the Court erected new, more restrictive barriers to bringing claims of racial discrimination in the drawing of electoral districts.

The most far-reaching actions weakening Section 2 came in the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (594 U.S. 647), and in the 2026 case Louisiana v. Callais (No. 24-109, slip op. (U.S. Apr. 29, 2026)). In Brnovich, the Court held that racially disparate voting rules do not necessarily violate Section 2 if the effects are “modest.” This ruling necessarily means that fewer challenges alleging racial discrimination under Section 2 will succeed in the future. Litigators have apparently recognized this reality: In early 2025 Bloomberg Law reported a remarkable drop in cases citing Section 2 in the years since the Brnovich ruling. Prior to Shelby County, voting rights litigators often referred to Section 5 as the shield that blocked discriminatory laws from ever being implemented and Section 2 as the sword used to strike down any such laws that did go into effect. And while Brnovich weakened Section 2’s ability to strike down racially discriminatory laws making it harder to cast a ballot, Callais is likely to do the same thing for claims of racial vote dilution. Handed down in April 2026, Callais is likely to make proving that lawmakers discriminated against minority voters when drawing their maps more difficult than it has been in decades. In the words of Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Callais “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” More than a decade after Shelby County, the shield is broken and the sword is dulled.

The hyperlocal nature of American election administration, virtually unique among developed democracies, further compounds efforts to find and halt problematic regulations. Countless policies—such as the siting of polling places or the drawing of school board districts—are developed at the county or even local level. Coupled with an ever-eroding capacity of local media in many areas of the country (and therefore fewer people asking questions about local governments’ activity), the localized nature of election administration makes it functionally impossible for the DOJ or advocacy groups to even know about all the potentially problematic changes that jurisdictions have enacted since Shelby County. Even if they could know, resources for litigation are limited. City council district lines in a small town, even if drawn in a manner that dilutes the power of minority voters, may simply not make it through the triage process for election lawyers and interest groups looking to contest discriminatory election policies in the courts. In the wake of the Shelby County decision, then, efforts to protect minority voting rights are necessarily less centralized and are also likely to be both less expeditious and less effective than they were before the Court’s decision.

If jurisdictions with a history of discriminating against minority voters began doing so again with federal oversight removed, we would expect substantial backsliding—or “retrogression”—of minority voting rights in the wake of Shelby County. That expectation guides the central line of inquiry in this book. For nearly fifty years, the VRA’s preclearance procedure did its job, blocking policies that would burden minority voters—regardless of whether a given jurisdiction intended to do so. The VRA’s victory over racial disenfranchisement was so total that it provided an opening for the Shelby County majority to posit that discriminatory election practices were a thing of the past. This assumption provides a testable proposition, and in the following chapters we engage a relatively simple overarching question: Has voting or representation become less racially equitable in jurisdictions formerly subject to preclearance since Shelby County?

Unfortunately, we find substantial evidence that they have. We show that Shelby County has been devastating for voting rights. Nearly everywhere we look and on every metric we can conceive, we find that the removal of federal preclearance has led to substantial backsliding in the extent to which minority voters enjoy equal representation and access to the ballot. Our examination of a wide range of state and local election actions—both those we are able to readily observe using data and those that to date have largely escaped media and scholarly attention—finds that they have materially undermined political representation for Americans of color. We estimate that hundreds of thousands of ballots have gone uncast by nonwhite Americans because of the forces unleashed by Shelby County v. Holder. And the effects of the decision appear only to be growing.

Our conclusions about the disastrous effects of the Shelby County decision shed light on broader processes at play in the American political system—and, specifically, on the implications of our highly federalized system of election administration. Fights like this one are hardly new; since its earliest days, there have been major disagreements about whether the decentralized nature of American electoral systems is a net positive. The lack of a single (federal) election administration is not without benefits. However, this book makes plain that America’s decentralized election oversight may also foster the proliferation of below-the-radar retrogressive policies.

In many ways, Section 5 offered a well-tailored balance to this federalism problem by ensuring federal oversight of a highly decentralized system. With this check on local autonomy gone, the system has deteriorated. And while the system might resist complete takeover by an antidemocratic regime, it also allows local actors to effect politics far beyond their home town. As political scientist Jacob Grumbach describes in Laboratories Against Democracy, “Antidemocratic interests need only to take control of a state government for a short period of time to implement changes that make it harder for their opponents to participate in politics at all levels—local, state, and national.” Our study of Shelby County both concurs with this conclusion and moves beyond it: While Grumbach rightly notes the importance of the 50 different state regimes, we argue that much of the backsliding is driven by actions taken at even lower levels—in the many thousands of counties and towns that are siting polling places, drawing school board districts, and maintaining voter rolls. The effects are all exacerbated by the decline of local media, making it harder than ever to track policy development among election administrators.

From An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act (Copyright © 2026), published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.