The Voting Rights Act at 61: What We’ve Lost, What Remains, and What Comes Next

Sixty-one years ago, Black Americans could not count on the ballot box to exercise their voice. They had the right to vote, guaranteed by the 15th Amendment nearly a hundred years prior, but the machinery of the Jim and Jane Crow South produced a century of systematic exclusion that rendered that right meaningless.  

Though this system of oppression was deeply entrenched and highly effective, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) transcended it. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965, the VRA gave Black people and other communities of color a federal guarantee that the political system would, for the first time, have to reckon with their presence. Importantly, the “legislative crown jewel of the civil rights era” was won not by persuasion but with persistence. Through sacrifice and grit, it was the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—enduring state troopers’ televised brutality—who wouldn’t let the nation look away and forced the president’s hand.  

Many of the Selma marchers who survived Bloody Sunday are still alive today. They didn’t risk their well-being and futures for less than a lifetime of political power protected under the law.  

The Louisiana v. Callais decision may have dealt a devastating blow to the VRA’s core protections, but it cannot and will not kill our resolve.  

Though the architects of Project 2025 and a corrupted Supreme Court might have other plans, we remain purposefully determined to protect and expand the franchise. The Louisiana v. Callais decision may have dealt a devastating blow to the VRA’s core protections, but it cannot and will not kill our resolve.  

What the Media Missed 

Much of the Callais coverage has framed it as another partisan gerrymandering story: a win for Republicans and a loss for Democrats. That framing is incomplete in ways that matter, because this decision is specifically and intentionally about race. And everyone, regardless of race, are harmed by a nonrepresentative, unaccountable government. 

In Voting Rights and Representation in the Aftermath of Louisiana v. Callais, a new policy brief by Dēmos Senior Research and Policy Counsel Angelo Ancheta, we lay out the full legal landscape regarding Callais, how we got here, and where we go from here. 

Here is what the Callais Court did not do. It did not kill the Voting Rights Act entirely. The VRA’s nationwide ban on literacy tests or other discriminatory voter registration requirements is still in effect. Language access protections and protections for voters with disabilities also remain. And state-level voting rights laws, entirely independent of the federal VRA and not subject to Callais, remain viable and are actively expanding in many places. 

Here is what the Callais Court actually did. Most devastatingly, it gutted Section 2 of the VRA by resurrecting an intent standard—a standard explicitly rejected by Congress in 1982 and essentially impossible to satisfy—that undermines the core promise of the law: to protect voters who “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”  

Going further, the Callais decision required plaintiffs to draw alternative maps that satisfy all the state’s goals, including its partisan goals, without using race as a benchmark of any kind. This further cements the Court’s “race-neutral” constitutionalism that ignores the role of racism in the distribution of political power—even when race is precisely what is being used to deny it. The Court also made majority-minority districts significantly harder to defend at every level of government; designed to limit VRA violations, these districts are now in peril, particularly in Southern states eager to dismantle political power that took decades of litigation to establish. 

Ultimately, the Voting Rights Act is gutted, but it’s not gone. And though a fundamental federal backstop is basically nonexistent, what comes next cannot depend on one. 

The Culmination of a Concerted Campaign 

The Callais decision is one in a series of decisions that have weakened the VRA. It is also part of a broader political project to entrench white minority rule, eliminating every legal protection that stands between racial equality and consolidated white power—in voting, education, employment, and everywhere else. 

 The timeline is deliberate: The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) invalidated preclearance, the VRA’s most efficient enforcement tool that required federal oversight of voting laws in states with a history of voter suppression. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court ruled that federal courts cannot hear partisan gerrymandering cases at all, claiming no clear legal standards exist, and gave legislators free license to redraw maps for partisan advantage. Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024) upheld the misguided presumption of legislators’ good faith, resulting in Republican legislators deliberately moving approximately 30,000 Black voters out of a district to reinforce Republicans' control.  

Callais (2026) was the culmination. The intersection of Callais and Rucho is where the damage is most severe; without the guardrails of Section 2, partisan gerrymanders can treat communities of color as disposable to advance their goals without any federal interventions available to stop it. 

This is not a series of independent legal decisions but a very intentional strategy.

This is not a series of independent legal decisions but a very intentional strategy. Our response, therefore, cannot be organized around winning back our civic rights one provision at a time. 

Rethinking Representation: Mobilizing on Multiple Fronts 

It may seem as though we’re back at the beginning, but we’re not. We have foundational values and a farsighted vision, reinforced by 61 years of proof of what’s possible. We mustn’t focus on restoration when what we need is reimagination. 

Importantly, voting rights advocacy has moved through two distinct generations. The first generation, beginning in 1965, focused on eliminating explicit barriers to the ballot (e.g., literacy tests and poll taxes). The second generation, beginning in the 1970s, focused on vote dilution—through systems and structures like majority-minority districts—to ensure that when Black and brown people could finally vote that their votes counted for something. Though the first generation is still intact, the Callais Court has systematically gutted the legal foundations of the second. 

A third generation of voting rights cannot be centered on defending federal protections alone. Though majority-minority districts were always vulnerable to legal challenge, they are, in fact, essential. In Congress, Black representatives grew from five in 1965 to 61 today; Latino representatives rose from three to 49. These real gains are now very much at risk.  

Sixty-one years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the fight for an authentic, indestructible multiracial democracy is not over. And we the people will make it happen.