Search Results for: VRA

Texas voters and grassroots political organization Voto Latino filed a lawsuit Monday in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas against Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Secretary of State John Scott, challenging Texas Senate Bill 6. The groups alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act. Senate Bill 6 sets forth new congressional [...]

The US House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 219-212 to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (“the amendment”) in an effort to amend and strengthen the civil-rights-era Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and to address a history of racial discrimination. The amendment comes exactly a week after US Assistant Attorney General for [...]

In a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines, the US Supreme Court upheld provisions of a restrictive Arizona voting law, stating that the provisions do not violate the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion. The legal challenge focused on two provisions: “precinct-based election-day voting and early mail-in voting.” The first [...]

Civil rights groups in Georgia filed another lawsuit against state officials on Monday over SB 202, a voting rights bill that imposes several barriers to accessing the polls. This legislation retaliates against widespread voter registration efforts in communities of color during the 2020 presidential election results, which resulted in record turnout but provoked baseless claims [...]

When Democrats took control of the House of Representatives after the 2018 midterm elections, they used their first piece of legislation to announce what their priorities would be after two years of not controlling any lever of the federal government. The bill called the “For the People Act of 2019,” sought to restructure portions of [...]

Voter suppression, which represents the dark underbelly of the American experiment, has reared its head throughout our history, particularly beginning at the cession of the Civil War. After the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, former slaves got an all-too-fleeting taste of emancipation when they not only came out to vote in droves, but [...]

Today, the U.S. legal system faces a public that is becoming increasingly impatient with systemic unequal protection of the law. As the peaceful arbiter of disputes in a democratic society, the judiciary cannot stray too far from that public, lest its legitimacy be lost. However, recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has pulled that judiciary further from [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed on Monday that Congress abrogated state sovereign immunity in the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The original complaint filed by the Alabama NAACP alleged that Alabama’s “at-large election method for the Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals and Court of Civil Appeals Section 2 of the Voting [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted an injunction on Wednesday that prevents a citizenship question from appearing on the 2020 census. The Secretary of Commerce had previously ordered the question, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” to appear on the 2020 census. The Department [...]

Before January 15th, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to have every 2020 Census respondent answer a question about citizenship (for the first time in sixty years) lived as either a story of bureaucratic and political intrigue or a high-profile case on the Supreme Court’s docket. The bureaucratic-intrigue focus would have included a chain of events [...]