Shelby County v. Holder:
The Court Guts the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in direct response to the events of March 7, 1965 — Bloody Sunday — when state and local police attacked 600 peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in full view of television cameras. President Johnson addressed Congress six days later and called for immediate passage of the most comprehensive voting rights legislation in American history.

The Act's most powerful provision was Section 5: the preclearance requirement. States and counties with a documented history of racial voter suppression — determined by a formula in Section 4 — could not change any election law, procedure, or practice without first obtaining approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington D.C. The burden of proof was on the state to demonstrate that the change would not suppress minority voting — not on voters to prove they were being harmed after the fact.

This was the key innovation. Before preclearance, Southern states played whack-a-mole: they would pass a discriminatory voting law, Black voters would bring a lawsuit, courts would strike it down years later, and the state would pass a slightly different discriminatory law. Preclearance stopped this cycle by requiring advance approval. Congress reauthorized the Act five times, most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0 and the House voted 390-33 in favor.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the five-member majority, did not rule that Section 5 (the preclearance requirement itself) was unconstitutional. He ruled that Section 4 — the formula determining which states were covered — was unconstitutional because it used data from the 1960s and 1970s, and "things have changed dramatically" since then. Without a valid coverage formula, Section 5 had no targets to apply to. The effect was to gut preclearance while technically leaving it on the books.

Roberts' key metaphor: keeping states covered based on historical discrimination was "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." He acknowledged this was circular, but argued Congress had not updated the coverage formula with current data — ignoring that Congress had unanimously reauthorized the existing formula just seven years earlier based on thousands of pages of evidence.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced within hours of the ruling that a strict photo ID law that had been blocked by the DOJ under preclearance would "go into effect immediately." North Carolina passed a sweeping omnibus voting restriction bill within weeks — one that its own legislature's racial impact analysis showed would disproportionately affect Black voters. The bill reduced early voting days, eliminated same-day registration, ended pre-registration for 16 and 17-year-olds, and required specific forms of photo ID that Black voters were less likely to possess. A federal appeals court later struck it down, finding it had targeted Black voters "with almost surgical precision."

Alabama announced it would implement a voter ID law that had been pending under preclearance — and then, shortly afterward, closed DMV offices in majority-Black counties, making it dramatically harder for Black residents to obtain the required ID. Mississippi and Georgia followed with their own voter restriction measures within months.

In the decade following Shelby County, formerly covered states closed more than 1,600 polling places, concentrated in areas with high Black voter populations. Georgia's Gwinnett County (majority non-white) saw 186 polling places consolidated into 90. Maricopa County, Arizona, reduced its polling places from 200 to 60 for the 2016 presidential primary, causing lines of up to five hours in minority-heavy precincts.

Aggressive voter roll purges — removing voters who had not cast ballots in recent elections — disproportionately affected Black voters who moved more frequently due to economic instability, many of whom did not receive notification that they had been purged until election day. In Georgia's 2018 governor's race, over 340,000 voters were purged from rolls in the two years before the election; the race was decided by 54,723 votes.

The pattern is not coincidence. The voting restriction measures implemented after Shelby County are concentrated in formerly covered jurisdictions, targeted tools that social science analysis consistently shows reduce Black voter participation, and passed by legislatures that conducted their own racial impact analyses and proceeded anyway. This is not indirect discrimination. It is direct discrimination operating in the absence of the enforcement mechanism that had contained it for 48 years.