In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has dutifully laboured to erode the protections guaranteed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a civil rights era milestone that aimed to safeguard minority voters from racial discrimination. Now, six decades after the law’s passage, the country’s highest judicial body will decide whether to drop some of the few pretences to justice and equality in US electoral democracy that remain.
Keep in mind that this is the same conservative-majority court that recently brought us the evisceration of Roe v Wade and other assorted sociopathic rulings, such as the one enshrining the constitutional right to carry a gun outside the home. That, by the way, was just a month after the Uvalde elementary school mass killing of 19 children and two adults.
One of the high-profile cases that the Supreme Court is currently hearing deals with Alabama’s congressional redistricting map, which was implemented by that state’s Republican legislature following the census in 2020. The redistricting scheme is a rather transparent violation of the Voting Rights Act. While more than 27 percent of Alabama’s voting-age population is Black, deft cartographic manoeuvres have produced an arrangement in which African American voters have a realistic chance of electing a candidate they like in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.