Speak Out: Is Voting Rights Act Outdated or Still Needed?

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently mulling the fate of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, Ala., v. Holder, a lawsuit claiming that Section 5 of the act is unconstitutional. 

Section 5 applies to nine U.S. states, including South Carolina. Under Section 5, jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect. Those states affected by Section 5 were selected based on having a history of voter suppression. 

In 1966, South Carolina challenged the section as unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court weighed in: 

Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.

Speak out: Is the Voting Rights Act still needed? Tell us in the comments!