The Voting Rights Act and after: vote dilution, registration law, and the fight over Section 2

The Voting Rights Act after 1965 refers to the second phase of American voting rights law, in which the main disputes moved from whether people could register to whether their votes carried equal weight (vote dilution) and how ordinary election rules affect different groups. The Supreme Court set the leading test for vote dilution under Section 2 in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), narrowed claims against election administration rules in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), and reaffirmed Gingles in Allen v. Milligan (2023).⁠^1,2,3 Congress meanwhile added registration and administration laws in 1993 and 2002.⁠^4,5 The Act’s origins, its 1965 provisions, and Shelby County v. Holder are covered in access and exclusion and are not repeated here.

In plain words

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked the most obvious ways people were kept from voting, like reading tests. After that, new questions came up.

One question was about weight, not access. Imagine a city where a minority group makes up a third of voters. If the city elects all its council members at large, and the majority always votes as a bloc, the minority may never elect anyone it prefers. Everyone can vote, but one group’s votes never decide anything. Courts call this “vote dilution.”

Another question was about everyday rules: where you vote, how you return a mail ballot, how your name stays on the rolls. Congress passed laws about voter registration in 1993 and about voting equipment and administration in 2002.

The courts are still arguing about how far the Voting Rights Act reaches. In 2021 the Supreme Court made it harder to challenge some voting rules. In 2023 it upheld a ruling against an Alabama congressional map. And a federal appeals court has said private groups cannot sue under the key section at all, at least in its region.

These are live disputes. This chapter explains the arguments on each side without taking one.

Defined terms

• Section 2. The Voting Rights Act’s nationwide ban on voting practices that deny or abridge the vote on account of race or color. Its 1982 amendment is summarized in access and exclusion.
• Vote dilution. A practice that leaves a group able to vote but less able to elect candidates it prefers, for example at-large elections or district lines. See gerrymandering.
• Vote denial (time, place, manner claims). A challenge to rules about how voting happens, such as polling place assignment or ballot return.⁠²
• Gingles preconditions. The three threshold showings for a Section 2 districting claim, followed by a “totality of circumstances” review.⁠¹
• Racially polarized voting. A pattern in which groups prefer different candidates. It is one of the Senate Report factors courts consider.⁠¹
• Private right of action. Whether private parties, not only the Attorney General, may sue to enforce a statute.⁠⁶
• List maintenance. State procedures to remove ineligible registrants, regulated by the National Voter Registration Act.⁠⁴

Evidence

Law: the vote dilution test

In Thornburg v. Gingles, decided June 30, 1986, the Supreme Court interpreted amended Section 2 in a challenge to multimember legislative districts. A minority group must show that it is “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district,” “that it is politically cohesive,” and that “the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc” usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.⁠¹ Courts then weigh the “totality of circumstances,” including Senate Report factors such as the history of voting discrimination, the extent of racially polarized voting, and the extent to which members of the minority group have been elected.⁠¹

The test turned a moral claim, that a group is shut out, into a set of measurable questions about population, geography, and voting patterns. It also made districting a field for expert statistical evidence.

Law: the test reaffirmed in 2023

In Allen v. Milligan, decided June 8, 2023, the Court affirmed a district court finding that plaintiffs were reasonably likely to show that Alabama’s 2021 congressional map violated Section 2. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for a 5 to 4 majority. The Court declined Alabama’s request to replace Gingles with a “race-neutral benchmark” based on computer-generated maps, describing the case as “about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew” and stating that “Section 2 cannot require courts to judge a contest of computers”.⁠³

Justice Thomas, dissenting, argued that Section 2 concerns access to the ballot and the counting of votes and should not apply to single-member districting; Justice Alito, also dissenting, argued that Gingles should be reinterpreted under modern methods of statutory interpretation.⁠³

Law: rules about how voting happens

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, decided July 1, 2021, by a 6 to 3 vote, addressed Arizona’s policy of not counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct and a law (HB 2023) limiting who may collect and return another person’s early ballot. The Court held that neither violated Section 2 and that HB 2023 was not enacted with a discriminatory purpose.⁠² Justice Alito’s majority opinion listed guideposts for such claims:

• “Mere inconvenience cannot be enough to demonstrate a violation of §2.”
• The degree to which a rule departs from practice when Section 2 was amended in 1982.
• “Small disparities are less likely than large ones to indicate that a system is not equally open.”
• “Courts must consider the opportunities provided by a State’s entire system of voting.”
• “Rules that are supported by strong state interests are less likely to violate §2”.⁠²

Justice Kagan, dissenting for three justices, wrote that “Today, the Court undermines Section 2 and the right it provides,” and that “the majority writes its own set of rules, limiting Section 2 from multiple directions”.⁠²

Law: who may sue

On November 20, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, asked: “Did Congress give private plaintiffs the ability to sue under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act? Text and structure reveal that the answer is no”.⁠⁶ Chief Judge Smith dissented, quoting earlier authority that “for decades and throughout hundreds of cases a private right of action has” been recognized.⁠⁶ The panel noted that the Supreme Court had not decided the question, citing Justice Thomas in Milligan and Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in Brnovich.⁠⁶ The ruling binds courts in that circuit; whether it becomes national law depends on later Supreme Court action.

Law: registration and administration statutes

Congress also changed the machinery of voting:

• National Voter Registration Act of 1993. According to the Justice Department, it requires that each state driver’s license application, including renewals, serve as a voter registration application; that offices providing public assistance or state-funded disability services offer registration; that states “accept and use the federal mail voter registration application form”; and that list maintenance not remove registrants “solely because of a failure to vote,” with systematic removal programs finished at least 90 days before a federal election.⁠⁴
• Help America Vote Act of 2002. The Justice Department notes that HAVA requires certain first-time mail registrants to show identification, such as “a current and valid photo identification,” or cast a provisional ballot, and that voters entitled to vote absentee under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act are exempt.⁠⁴ HAVA also created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which the commission describes as an “independent, bipartisan commission” that adopts voluntary voting system guidelines, accredits test laboratories, certifies voting systems, maintains the national mail registration form, and publishes the Election Administration and Voting Survey.⁠⁵ Equipment history is covered in election technology.

Research results: participation after Shelby County

Researchers disagree about what the loss of preclearance did. Mayya Komisarchik and Ariel White, in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science (2025), compare formerly covered places with others using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design. They report that preclearance had constrained some practices, such as voter identification laws, but find minimal Black-white participation gaps after the decision and generally stable, possibly increased, minority participation in formerly covered places.⁠⁷

James Harrison and Aaron Gamino, in Economics and Politics (2024), study preclearance’s protections for language minorities. Using a triple-difference design, they report that turnout held steady in counties shielded by preclearance and declined in others, and they link the shield to later differences in education funding and economic outcomes.⁠⁸ The two studies ask different questions, about different groups and periods, so they are not direct contradictions; together they show that the effects of preclearance remain an open empirical question.

Current data: turnout

The Census Bureau reported on April 30, 2025, that 65.3 percent of the citizen voting-age population, about 154 million people, voted in the November 2024 election, and that 73.6 percent were registered.⁠⁹ Breakdowns by race, Hispanic origin, and age are in the Bureau’s detailed tables; any comparison across groups should cite those tables directly.

Competing interpretations

Section 2 as a guarantee of effective participation. The Gingles framework, the Milligan majority, and the Brnovich dissent read Section 2 as protecting not only the act of voting but an equal opportunity to elect representatives of choice.⁠^1,2,3 Supporters argue that without it, majorities can draw lines or adopt rules that neutralize minority votes.

Section 2 as a limited ban. Justice Thomas’s Milligan dissent and the Eighth Circuit majority read the statute more narrowly, as concerned with ballot access and counting, or as enforceable only by the government.⁠^3,6 Supporters argue that race-conscious districting raises its own constitutional problems and that Congress should state any private remedy expressly.

Ordinary burdens versus disparate effects. The Brnovich majority emphasized that every voting rule imposes some burden and that states have strong interests in preventing fraud and pressure.⁠² The dissent emphasized that rules with unequal effects can deny equal opportunity even without discriminatory intent.⁠² This is the core of the current debate, and it is not settled by evidence alone; it turns on what the statute means.

Did the protections still matter? The research above is mixed.⁠^7,8 Readers should treat claims that Shelby County either caused large turnout declines or changed nothing as stronger than the published evidence cited here supports.

Interpretation, this site’s reading. Every position in this debate accepts that rules shape outcomes. They disagree about which outcomes count as unlawful and who should decide. That is a question for courts and Congress, not for a participation framework.

Application to this framework

These are design implications, not claims about legal status.

1. Measure weight, not only access. Vote dilution shows that equal access can coexist with unequal influence. In a priority tool, a group can participate and still always be outnumbered. Publishing distributions, not only top results, shows where a minority’s priorities differ; see collective priorities and tyranny of the majority.
2. Report disparities with denominators. Brnovich turned partly on how large disparities were.⁠² Any claim My Vote Forward publishes about unequal participation should give counts, denominators, and margins of error; see measurement.
3. No removal for inactivity. The NVRA bars removing registrants solely for not voting.⁠⁴ A parallel principle for a participation tool is that silence does not cancel standing; see what if most people never participate.
4. Geography is a design choice. Gingles depends on how districts are drawn.⁠¹ When results are grouped by area, the choice of boundaries changes what appears; the framework should publish the boundaries it uses.
5. The framework is not a remedy. Nothing in a priority tool enforces Section 2, registers voters, or substitutes for official elections.

Hypothetical example. A county publishes priority results by commissioner district. One neighborhood that strongly favors transit improvements is split across three districts, so transit never ranks first in any district. Publishing countywide and neighborhood-level results alongside district results would show a priority that district lines hide.

Unresolved questions

• Will the Supreme Court decide whether private parties may sue under Section 2, and how.⁠⁶?
• How will lower courts apply the Brnovich guideposts to new rules on mail voting and ballot return⁠²?
• What did the end of preclearance change in participation, and for whom? The studies cited here point in different directions⁠^7,8
• As computational redistricting improves, how should courts weigh simulated maps, given Milligan‘s refusal to make Section 2 “a contest of computers”⁠³?