Docket 12-96
Shelby County v. Holder
DecidedJun 25, 2013
5-4decision
Source: CourtListener.
Supreme Court strikes down the formula deciding which states must get federal approval for voting changes
Impact9/10
What it does
The ruling declares Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act—the formula that determines which states and localities must obtain federal approval before changing voting laws—unconstitutional because it relies on decades-old data. This effectively disables Section 5's preclearance requirement, since no jurisdictions can be covered without a valid formula, unless Congress writes a new one based on current conditions.
Who benefits
State and local governments in the nine states and additional counties previously covered by the formula (mostly in the South), which no longer must submit voting law changes to federal officials for advance approval.
Who is affected
Minority voters in the formerly covered jurisdictions, who lose the preclearance mechanism that had blocked hundreds of proposed voting changes found to be discriminatory; the Department of Justice and civil rights groups, who lose the tool of advance federal review and must instead rely on after-the-fact lawsuits under Section 2.
Practical impact
States and counties previously subject to preclearance can now change voting laws, redistricting maps, and polling procedures without prior federal approval, taking effect immediately unless successfully challenged after the fact under Section 2. The Department of Justice and private plaintiffs must now sue to block discriminatory voting changes after they are enacted, rather than preventing them in advance, and several formerly covered states enacted new voter-identification and redistricting laws shortly after the decision.
Majority reasoning
The Court held that the Voting Rights Act's preclearance scheme departs sharply from ordinary principles of federalism and "equal sovereignty" among states, and such extraordinary measures can only be justified by extraordinary, current conditions. The majority found that conditions have changed dramatically since 1965: voter registration and turnout gaps between Black and white voters have nearly disappeared, blatant discrimination is rare, and minority officeholding has increased dramatically, largely because of the Act itself. Because the coverage formula still uses 1960s and 1970s data on literacy tests and low turnout—tests that have been illegal nationwide for over 40 years—the majority concluded it no longer reflects current needs and is not rationally tied to current conditions. The majority rejected the government's "reverse-engineered" defense of the formula and its argument that discrimination remaining in originally-identified states justifies continued coverage regardless of comparison to non-covered states, stating that history did not end in 1965. In response to the dissent's reliance on the legislative record, the majority stated that regardless of how the record is read, it does not show anything like the pervasive, flagrant discrimination that distinguished covered jurisdictions from the rest of the country in 1965, and that Congress never used its record to build a formula tied to current facts.
Dissent reasoning
Justice Ginsburg, writing for four justices, argued that Congress compiled a 15,000-page record showing that discrimination, though changed in form, remained concentrated in the covered jurisdictions, including "second-generation barriers" like racial gerrymandering, at-large voting schemes, and discriminatory annexation. She argued the proper standard of review is whether Congress had a rational basis for its judgment, a deferential standard the Court had applied in every prior VRA case, and that reauthorization of an existing, working remedy deserves special deference since a working remedy will naturally show less blatant discrimination than the original record. The dissent contended that Shelby County's own history—including recent redistricting maneuvers and a 2010 FBI investigation capturing lawmakers plotting to suppress Black turnout—showed the preclearance requirement was clearly constitutional as applied to it, and that the county's facial challenge should have failed for that reason alone. The dissent also argued the majority misapplied the "equal sovereignty" principle, which Katzenbach limited to the admission of new states, and warned that striking the formula was like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet," since the very success of preclearance in deterring discrimination was being used as a reason to end it.
Constitutional question
Whether the Voting Rights Act's coverage formula, which determines which states and localities must get federal "preclearance" before changing voting laws, remains constitutional given that it is based on data from the 1960s and 1970s.
Precedent changed
The majority narrows the practical effect of South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) and City of Rome v. United States (1980), which upheld the coverage formula and preclearance scheme under a rational-basis standard, by holding that the formula as reauthorized in 2006 no longer satisfies constitutional requirements given current conditions.