On the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Midday discusses the status of voting rights for U.S. citizens with two legal scholars.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965, about a year after the landmark Civil Rights Act became the law of the land. The Voting Rights Act provided greater protections for the right to vote and required several states to change their restrictive election laws.
The Voting Rights Act saw updates and extensions in the preceding decades. In 2006, President Bush signed a 25-year extension of the law. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder weakened voter protections.
And just last week, the Supreme Court announced that in its next term, it would rule in a redistricting case in Louisiana that could result in further diminishment of voter protections.
Richard Dellheim is the former Deputy Chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. He retired earlier this year after 28 years as a lawyer with the DOJ.
F. Michael Higginbotham is the Laurence M. Katz Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. He’s a former interim dean of the law school, and a former candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. Congress in Maryland's 7th District.
