Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Dissent in Shelby County v. Holder

In 2006 the town of Calera in Alabama drew up a new redistricting scheme for its elections to city council seats; as a result, the city council’s lone African American member lost his seat. According to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this redistricting was illegal because Calera had not first allowed the federal government to examine its redistricting plan to be certain that it did not discriminate against African American voter participation, a practice referred to as “preclearance.” As a former segregationist state, Alabama was subject to the scrutiny of preclearance. Shelby County, where Calera was located in Alabama, filed suit in federal court to declare Section 5 unconstitutional. In 2013 the case reached the Supreme Court, where a 5–4 majority agreed with Shelby County. As Chief Justice John Roberts asserted in his majority opinion, “the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions. . . . Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.” The Court’s decision was debated heavily over the next several years, as there had been many arguments that discrimination against minority voters was as prevalent as it had ever been. Since the decision, many districts throughout the United States have shut polling places in predominantly African American neighborhoods and purged voter rolls, especially in those former states that once maintained Jim Crow laws.