What was the Voting Rights Act of 1968?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965, protected voter registration for African Americans and other minorities by banning discriminatory practices that southern states had used since the end of Reconstruction to keep Black citizens from the polls. The question asked here uses the date 1968, which is sometimes confused with the original 1965 statute and the additional civil rights legislation of 1968. The 1965 act is the foundational law, while 1968 saw the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which focused on fair housing rather than voting.

The Voting Rights Act protected voter registration and voting itself in several specific ways. Section 2 prohibited any voting practice or procedure that resulted in denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color. Section 4 created a coverage formula that identified state and local jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination, including most Southern states. Section 5 required those covered jurisdictions to obtain preclearance from the Justice Department or a federal court before changing any voting law or procedure, including registration rules, polling place locations, and district lines.

Section 6 authorized the federal government to send examiners directly into covered jurisdictions to register voters. Section 8 allowed federal observers to monitor elections. Section 10 banned poll taxes in state and local elections, and the Supreme Court extended the ban in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections in 1966. Section 4(e) protected Spanish-language ballots for Puerto Rican voters in New York.

Within months of the act's passage, federal examiners had registered tens of thousands of Black voters in places where local registrars had refused them for decades. Black voter registration in Mississippi rose from 6.7 percent in 1964 to nearly 60 percent by 1968. The number of Black elected officials nationwide rose from a few hundred in 1965 to more than 5,700 by 1990.

Congress strengthened and reauthorized the act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006. The 1975 amendments added protections for language minorities. The 2006 reauthorization extended Section 5 preclearance for 25 years. The Supreme Court struck down the Section 4 coverage formula in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, weakening enforcement, although Section 2 remains active and is the basis of much current voting rights litigation.