type: timeline_event The Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder on June 25, 2013, striking down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which contained the formula used to determine which states and localities required federal preclearance before changing their voting laws. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that the coverage formula was based on 40-year-old data and that "things have changed dramatically" in the South, rendering the preclearance requirement an unconstitutional intrusion on state sovereignty. Without a valid coverage formula, Section 5's preclearance requirement became unenforceable. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurrence urging the court to go further and strike Section 5 itself as unconstitutional.
The decision had immediate and sweeping consequences. Within hours of the ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance, and North Carolina moved to enact a broad package of voting restrictions. Within two years, more than half of the states previously covered by preclearance had enacted new voting restrictions. The Brennan Center for Justice documented that states freed from preclearance closed hundreds of polling locations, shortened early voting periods, implemented strict ID requirements, and conducted aggressive voter roll purges that disproportionately affected Black, Latino, and Native American voters.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent argued that "throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." Congress has not passed legislation to restore the preclearance requirement since the ruling. The Shelby County decision is widely regarded by voting rights advocates as one of the most consequential rollbacks of civil rights protections since Reconstruction, opening the door to the voter suppression campaigns that Heritage Action, ALEC, and state Republican parties had been developing for years.