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For nearly 100 years after the constitutional enfranchisement of all African Americans and
the extension of equal protection under the law to all citizens, the voting power of ethnic
minorities throughout the country, and particularly in the South, was suppressed by
aggressive intimidation tactics, the widespread use of violence, unconstitutional voting
rules, and the lack of effective means of recourse. The passage of the Voting Rights Act in
1965 provided the federal government additional tools with which to enforce the rights
guaranteed under the 14th and 15th amendments, and specifically outlawed many voter
suppression practices. The statute required large-scale Justice Department monitoring of
elections in states with a poor history of ensuring voting rights, and paved the way for
legal challenges against those who continued disenfranchisement efforts.

From 1964 to 1974, in the seven Southern states covered by Section 5 of the Voting
Rights Act, registration of black voters increased from 29 to over 56 percent, and the
disparity between white and black registration decreased from 44.1 to 11.2
percent.45 Over the last 30 years the situation has continued to improve. In Louisiana and
Mississippi, the registration rate among blacks today exceeds that of whites. Problems
persist nonetheless. In modern presidential elections, about 2 percent of all ballots are
spoiled (at the low end of the range in well-established democracies),46 and hundreds of
thousands of additional voters are not permitted to cast their vote on election day due to
problems in the registration process.47 Thousands more are deliberately targeted in
efforts to suppress their vote. The effect on election outcomes is often minute, but the
voters in question are disproportionately minority and urban, meaning their collective
political voice is muffled and their access to the political process is reduced relative to
white, nonurban voters. Because African Americans tend overwhelmingly to vote
Democratic when they do vote—and because problems in obtaining government-issued
photo identification, rates of arrest and imprisonment, and poverty tend to affect African
Americans disproportionately—the purely partisan interests of Republicans in affecting
election outcomes assume an unfortunate racial character.
“Majority-minority” districts spawned by the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1982 have
added to the presence of minorities in legislatures, as boundaries have been drawn to
concentrate minority voters. The 1992 elections, the first based on lines drawn after the
1982 law was enacted, led to a jump in the number of minorities in the House of
Representatives, from 38 to 58.48 While this has clearly been beneficial to minorities (and
the Democratic Party) at one level of analysis, subsequent studies have raised the question
of whether broader minority interests have truly been enhanced, since the districts created
have left adjoining districts bereft of the reliable Democratic voters that minority
candidates often represent.49
Even after the legislative reforms of the past 50 years, some ethnic minorities, particularly
African Americans, continue to face voter intimidation and disenfranchisement efforts,
although the methods are often less crude than in the past. In New Jersey in 1981, the
Republican National Committee (RNC) set up “ballot security” task forces, exclusively in
precincts with a majority of ethnic minority voters, to purge voter rolls of citizens whose
mail was returned as undeliverable. It then deployed hired armed guards to polling places
on election day. In response, a U.S. District Court issued a ban on efforts to target specific
groups for disenfranchisement or intimidation, even if the means are otherwise
legitimate.50

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