The Voting Rights Act did not collapse on a single day. When the last of its meaningful protections were effectively eliminated on April 29, 2026, the outcome had been in the making for more than 60 years. What appeared to some as a sudden loss was, in fact, the final chapter of a sustained legal campaign to dismantle a law that changed American democracy when it passed in 1965.
Understanding where things stand today requires tracing the sequence of court decisions that methodically stripped the law down to its foundation before removing the foundation itself.
The first Voting challenge
Opposition to the Voting Rights Act surfaced almost immediately after its passage. In 1966, South Carolina filed suit against the federal government in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, targeting Section 5 of the law. That provision required states and localities with a documented history of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval before making any changes to their voting laws or procedures.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the law, affirming that Congress had the authority to act on documented patterns of disenfranchisement. The lone dissent did not prevail, but it planted the legal reasoning that opponents would return to for generations.
2013 and the ruling that changed everything
The most consequential blow arrived in 2013. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula contained in Section 4(b) of the law. That formula determined which jurisdictions were subject to the Section 5 preclearance requirement. Without it, Section 5 became unenforceable.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argued that the formula relied on outdated data and that conditions had changed substantially since 1965. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent framed the decision differently, comparing it to discarding an umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm because one had not yet gotten wet.
The practical consequences arrived quickly. States moved to implement stricter voter identification requirements, close polling locations in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and reduce early voting opportunities, all without any requirement to seek federal approval first.
Section 2 becomes the last line of defense
With Section 5 rendered ineffective, voting rights attorneys shifted their strategy toward Section 2, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. That protection did not survive intact either.
In 2021, the Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting restrictions in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, even after findings that those restrictions disproportionately affected voters of color. The ruling introduced interpretive standards not found in the text of the law itself, making it substantially harder for plaintiffs to prevail in future Section 2 cases.
Three years later, in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the Court allowed states greater latitude to defend racially discriminatory congressional maps by attributing the line-drawing to partisan rather than racial motivation. The practical effect was to blur a distinction that had previously served as a meaningful check on discriminatory redistricting.
The final ruling
The last significant protection fell in 2026. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court held that compliance with Section 2 could not itself justify race-conscious redistricting under the 15th Amendment. Advocates who had spent years using Section 2 litigation to challenge discriminatory maps lost the primary legal instrument they had left.
The Association for the Study of African American Life and History described the outcome as the result of a 60-year campaign to undo what Congress built in 1965.
What the historical record shows
The AFRO newspaper, which has covered this legal trajectory since the Voting Rights Act’s passage, has documented each ruling and its downstream effects on Black communities across the country. Its publisher, Frances Murphy Toni Draper, has consistently placed each development in its broader historical context, connecting individual court decisions to the longer arc of voter suppression in the United States.
The record of those six decades makes clear that the law’s protections were not lost to a single decision or a single court. They were eroded through a sequence of rulings, each building on the last, until the structure that remained could no longer hold. What advocates are left with now is the harder work of determining what comes next in the absence of federal protections that once defined the legal floor.
