Are Civil Rights Laws Being Reversed? | FRONTLINE: What’s the Deal with Voters’ Rights?
Video Transcript

Sarah Childress: Hi, I'm Sarah Childress. I'm a reporter for Frontline, and today, I'm answering your questions about voting. We have a question from Sharmayne Lawson-Franklin, and she writes: How many states have reversed Civil Rights legislation that helped bring equality to voting practices?

So, Sharmayne, there's actually just one big piece of voting legislation from the federal government, and that's called the Voting Rights Act.

It was passed in 1965 and it outlawed any kind of discrimination against voters. The Voting Rights Act provision banning discrimination overall still exists, but it also had that singled out states that have a history of discrimination against minority voters, in particular African-American voters, but also Latinos and other minorities. In these states, the law required them to submit any changes to their voting law to the federal government for approval before they took effect.

So, these states had to prove that the laws they wanted to put in place wouldn't discriminate against minorities. That all changed with the Supreme Court decision Shelby v. Holder. In that decision, the Supreme Court overturned that particular provision of the Voting Rights Act, which meant that those states now could proceed to pass any kind of voting legislation they wanted, just like all the other states.