Washington (AP) – Wednesday is the 60th anniversary of the day that President Lyndon Johnson has the US Capitol and with Martin Luther King Jr., signed the law on voting rights in the law.
The law protected the right to vote and ensured that the government would fight the efforts to oppress, especially those who aimed at black voters. For many Americans, it was the day when the US democracy began.
That was back then.
The law has slowly eroded for more than a decade and began with the decision of the Supreme Court of 2013 that all or parts of 15 states with discrimination against the federal government receive the approval of the federal government before changing their elections. Within a few hours after the decision, some countries that were under the preparation of the provisional began to announce plans for stricter voting laws.
These changes have continued, in particular since the presidential election 2020 and the wrong claims of President Donald Trump that the widespread fraud was re -elected. The Supreme Court confirmed a significant part of the law on voting rights in 2023, but in its coming term in office, it is planned to hear a case that would effectively neutral the law.
According to the right to vote, these cases will largely determine whether a pioneering law will have future anniversaries in a turbulent age ago.
“We are currently at a critical time,” said Demetria McCain, director of politics at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “And, let’s be clear, our democracy is only 60 when the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act comes here. I say that because there are so many attacks on voting rights, especially with regard to black communities and color communities.”
Indians celebrate a victory that could be fleeting
The reservation of the Turtle Mountain Band from Chippewa Indians is about 16 kilometers from the Canadian border, a region of forests, miniature lakes and huge prairie country. The main street is a mixture of miniature houses, mobile homes and companies. A shiny casino and a hotel, not far from, bison to pasture.
In 2024, the trunk and another in North Dakota, the Spirit Lake Stamm, formed a common political district for the first time. They had filed a lawsuit in which it was argued that the way the lines for state legislative seats were drawn to choose the right to choose candidates of their choice. Peter Welte, the top judge of the US district court, approved and hired a novel card.
State Rep. Collette Brown ran for the legislator because she wanted to see more representation of the American indigenous people, and she won under the novel card.
“It felt surreal. I felt completed, I felt recognized,” said Brown, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and the executive director of the Gaming Commission of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “I felt ok, it’s time for us to really make changes and really educate from the inside so that we are not silent.”
Brown, a Democrat, has also said several legislative proposals for Indian topics that have been rightly so, including support for the return of remains and artifacts and warnings for missing indigenous people.
This year’s anniversary of the Voting Rights Act forces them to “check how far we have come,” said Jamie Azure, chairman of the Turtle Mountain Tribe.
Now the future of her district is in the hands of the Supreme Court.
Can individuals face the challenges for voting rights?
The Circuit 8th Circuit, which covers North Dakota and six other states, raised the decision of Welte 2-1 and said that the tribes and companies such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU have no right to sue the violations of the constitutional rights of voters.
This judgment expanded to an earlier opinion of the 8th circuit from Arkansas, which rejected another challenge for the same reasons. At the end of the last month, a court on the 3rd circuit decided in a separate case of Arkansas that only the US Attorney General can submit such cases – no private persons or groups.
These decisions have improved decades of precedent. The Supreme Court recorded the decision for the tribes while deciding whether to take the case of North Dakota.
The voting right initiative of the University of Michigan Law School found that since 1982 almost 87% of the claims within the framework of this part of the voting law law known as Section 2 of private individuals and organizations.
It is particularly problematic to give individuals without the opportunity to face challenges because the Ministry of Justice under Trump, a Republican, seems to be focused on other priorities, said Sophia Lin Lakin, who heads the ACLU voting rights project.
The government’s voting rights unit was dismantled and has given novel priorities that, as she said, “was created against people to protect them”.
The Ministry of Justice refused to answer questions about the priorities of the voting rights to answer the cases it pursues or whether it would be involved in the cases of voting rights before the nation’s highest court.
The Supreme Court weighs another case about race and congress districts
Two years ago, voting rights activists celebrated when the Supreme Court of Section 2 kept in a case from Alabama in which the state drew an addition congress district in favor of black voters. Now it is ready to repeat a similar case from Louisiana, which could change or reverse this decision.
The court heard the case in March, but did not make a decision during the term. In an arrangement on Friday, the court asked the lawyers to provide letters in which he declared that “the intentional creation of a second majority marketing districts by the state violates the fourteenth or fifteenth changes to the US constitution.”
Robert Weiner, the director of voting rights for the legal rights committee for civil rights, said, while it was a “matter of concern” that the court asks the question that the nine judges did not make a decision during the last term that there were already five votes.
“You would not need a new argument if the pages had already been selected,” he said.
Trump’s Ministry of Justice is moving to voting questions
At a time when the remaining protection of the voting law law is threatened, the Ministry of Justice has postponed its deaf -related priorities.
According to General Prosecutor Pam Bondi, it was canceled or withdrawn from several election and coordination cases. Instead, the department has focused on concerns about voter fraud that conservative activists addressed after years of incorrect claims on elections.
The department has also sent inquiries for information on voter registration as well as data on election fraud and warnings of election violations against at least 19 countries.
In addition to postponing the focus in the Ministry of Justice, the federal legislation has now never been used to protect voting rights. Democrats have reintroduced the law on John Lewis’ voting rights, but it is the legislation that they did not pass in 2022 when they held both houses of the Congress and the White House and needed some Republican support in the Senate.
At the beginning of this year, Trump signed an executive regulation in which voting in the states was revised. This contains a documentary proof of nationals for the federal government, although a vast part of it has been blocked before the courts. The house controlled by GOP passed a legislative template that would require proof of citizenship to register in order to receive the vote. And GERRYMANGING state legislative and congress districts are still predominant.
The ponderous termination of the 60-year law has created an unequal distribution of voting rights, said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights Center at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Some states were energetic for the expansion of access to the vote, while others focused on the restriction of the vote.
“The last five to ten years,” he said, “the experiences of voters are increasingly dependent on where they live.”
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Dura reported from Belcourt, ND Associated Press Writer Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis, contributed to this report.
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Follow the reporting on the voting rights by the AP at https://apnews.com/hub/voting-rights.
