President Donald Trump’s electoral college majority in the 2025 election gave me hope that the Republican Party would stop trying to suppress the vote. How naive of me. “Trump’s Justice Department appointees remove leadership of voting unit,” reads a headline in The Guardian’s U.S. edition. The article goes on to detail how officials at the nation’s highest legal office recently removed all managers of the voting rights section and dismissed any active cases.
While the headline was not surprising, I was disappointed that the Department of Justice had been deprived of its resources for protecting the right to vote. A Google search showed me some additional articles, but major newspapers like the New York Times didn’t really cover it.
So we have to do the work ourselves. It’s important to know the history behind why we have a Voting Rights Act in the first place and the consequences of chipping away at its provisions. Let’s get started.
The History
Here’s a brief timeline: The Johnson Administration passed The Voting Rights Act in 1965 because Black Americans and members of other racial groups, including Mexican Americans, were denied their constitutional right to vote.
The Voting Rights Act aimed to overturn a century of voter suppression. After the Fifteenth Amendment promised Black people the right to vote, southern states sent more than 1,500 Black men to state legislatures. The U.S. Senate even had two Black senators, Hiram Revels in 1870 and Blanche K. Bruce in 1875.
Multiracial state legislatures passed bills that aimed to empower all Americans – for example, South Carolina made a universal education system part of its 1868 Constitution. However, this new system didn’t last long as South Carolina and many other states took measures to prevent Black citizens from voting. Other states restricted the Mexican-American vote as well. Historically, measures that prevented Black and Mexican citizens from voting included:
- Literacy tests, including ones that were not just simple exercises to prove you can read, but rather challenging comprehension exams
- Poll taxes or charging a fee to vote.
- “White primaries” in which only white members of a political party could vote
- Failing to provide voting materials in voters’ native language
- Purging voter lists in states with large Latino populations, such as Arizona
- Stationing police officers near polling sites
- Disenfranchising people who are convicted felons
These efforts were extremely successful. The number of Black people who voted in southern states plummeted in the late 1900s. After Blanche Bruce was elected to the Senate in 1875, it took almost 100 years for another Black American to be elected to that chamber, which not coincidentally, happened two years after the Voting Rights Act passed.
Without lawyers in our federal government to hold officials accountable, politicians will dilute the vote of Americans of color.
Just last week, a federal court ruled that Alabama purposely weakened Black voters’ power through its Congressional map. The state must continue using an updated version that led to the recent election of its second Black congressman.
And think again if you believe it’s only Southern states. In Nassau County, New York, four Latino voters allege that the district map in Nassau County dilutes their communities’ power to affect change at the ballot black. While Blacks, Latinos, and Asians make up almost half of the Nassau population, 15 of the county’s 19 districts have a majority white population.
How to Resist
Thankfully, history gives us the warning signs, but also a roadmap to resist:
- In Dallas, activists from the GI Forum went door-to-door, registering people to vote. If they could not pay the poll tax, someone would do it for them, thanks to neighbors funding collections to pay the fees
- In Brooklyn, Puerto Rican leaders like Antonia Denis prepped Latino voters for literacy tests
- In New York, Puerto Rican Martha Cardona was the plaintiff in a Supreme Court lawsuit to ensure access to materials in the native languages of voters. She had tried to register to vote in 1963 but could not pass the required English proficiency test
- In Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio racially profiled Latinos for years, leading to protests and a lawsuit that exposed his behavior. Latinos registered to vote in droves as a result. Even his actions of stationing police officers near the polls could not stop a multiracial coalition of voters from removing him from office in 2016, almost 25 years after he came to power
We do not face a new foe – voter suppression is part of the fabric of our history. Thankfully, so are the tactics that overturn and undermine these efforts. Let’s get to work.
