Shelby County v. Holder and the Day Preclearance Went Dark

Within hours of the decision, Texas moved. On the morning of June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court announced its ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, a case brought by a suburban county south of Birmingham, Alabama. By that afternoon the attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, had announced that the state's strict photo ID law for voters, which a federal court had blocked the year before, would take effect immediately. Officials in other states that had been covered by the same part of the Voting Rights Act began preparing their own changes. For almost half a century, a long list of states and counties, most of them in the South, had needed the federal government's permission before changing anything about how people voted: moving a polling place, redrawing a district line, changing an ID rule, switching from district to at-large elections. That requirement was called preclearance. The Court did not technically strike it down. It struck the formula that decided who was covered, which meant nobody was. Preclearance still exists in the text of the law. It has simply had no one to apply to since that June morning.

In short: Shelby County v. Holder, decided 5-4 on June 25, 2013, held that the formula Congress used to decide which places needed federal approval before changing voting rules was outdated and unconstitutional. With no formula, preclearance stopped operating, and the states and counties it had covered were free to close polling places, purge rolls and pass new voting laws without advance review, leaving after-the-fact lawsuits as the main remedy.

What preclearance was built to stop

To understand what the Court took away in 2013, go back to the problem Congress was trying to solve in 1965.

Before the Voting Rights Act, the Fifteenth Amendment had promised for nearly a century that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race. In much of the South that promise was empty. States used literacy tests administered at the discretion of white registrars, poll taxes, white primaries, and outright violence to keep Black citizens off the rolls. When the Justice Department sued over one discriminatory practice, a state or county could simply adopt a new one, and the litigation would have to start over. Lawsuits moved at the speed of courts. Discrimination moved at the speed of a legislature.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act flipped that sequence. In the places it covered, any change to voting rules had to be approved in advance, either by the Justice Department or by a federal court in Washington, and the jurisdiction had to show that the change would not make minority voters worse off. The burden of proof was on the state, not the voter. Section 4 contained the formula for coverage, based on whether a place had used a test or device to screen voters and had low registration or turnout in certain presidential elections.

The formula, as later updated, ended up covering nine states in full, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, and counties or townships in several others, including parts of California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota and Michigan.

Preclearance was meant to be temporary. Congress extended it in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006. The 2006 extension, which ran for twenty-five years, passed the Senate unanimously, 98 to 0, passed the House by a lopsided bipartisan margin, and was signed by President George W. Bush. Congress built a record of thousands of pages before voting. What it did not do was update the formula, which still relied on data from decades earlier.

The county that brought the case

Shelby County, Alabama, is a fast-growing, mostly white suburban county south of Birmingham. It was an odd plaintiff in one respect: the county's own recent history included exactly the kind of change preclearance existed to catch.

In 2008 the city of Calera, inside Shelby County, redrew its city council districts and annexed new territory, and the new plan eliminated the city's only majority-Black council district. The city had not obtained preclearance before holding an election under the new map, and in that election the council's only Black member lost his seat. The Justice Department objected to the plan, and the city ultimately had to hold a new election. Justice Ginsburg pointed to Calera in her dissent as evidence that the problem preclearance addressed was not ancient history.

The county's lawsuit did not argue that Calera had been treated unfairly. It made a broader claim: that the coverage formula, and perhaps preclearance itself, was unconstitutional as applied to anyone in 2013. The county was, in effect, a vehicle for a question the conservative legal movement had been pressing for years, and the Court had signaled interest in that question in a 2009 case involving a Texas utility district, in which it avoided ruling on the formula but warned that preclearance raised serious constitutional concerns.

The deterrent nobody could count

One of the hardest things to measure about preclearance is what it prevented without ever having to act.

Formal objections by the Justice Department were the visible part. The less visible part was the changes that were never adopted because the officials considering them knew they would need to explain them to federal lawyers. Some proposals were withdrawn after the department asked for more information. Others were simply never proposed. Election officials in covered places learned to ask, before acting, whether a change would hold up. That kind of deterrence leaves no paper trail, which made it easy for critics to say the law was no longer doing much, and easy for defenders to say it was doing more than anyone could prove.

The Court's reasoning, at full strength

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by the four other conservative justices. It deserves to be stated in its strongest form, because the argument was not frivolous.

The opinion said that the Voting Rights Act had worked. Black registration and turnout in the covered states had risen dramatically, and in some covered states Black turnout had come to equal or exceed white turnout. Black officials held office across the South. The opinion said that preclearance was an extraordinary departure from the basic principle that states are equal sovereigns and that federal law treats them alike. It could be justified, the Court said, only by current conditions, and the formula Congress reauthorized in 2006 was built on facts from the 1960s and early 1970s. The country had changed, Roberts wrote, and if Congress wanted to single out some states, it had to use a formula that reflected the present.

The Court invited Congress to write a new formula. It said nothing to prevent preclearance itself from applying to a different set of places, chosen on current evidence.

Here is the fair point inside that reasoning: a law that treats states differently should rest on why those states are different now. A formula that never changes can come to look like a punishment for history rather than a response to current conduct.

The dissent and the umbrella

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the four dissenters, and her answer turned on a single image. Preclearance was working, she argued, which was the reason the record looked better. The covered jurisdictions had kept trying to make discriminatory changes all along, and the Justice Department had kept blocking them. Removing the protection because things had improved under it, she wrote, "is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

She also stressed how much evidence Congress had gathered in 2006 about continuing discrimination in the covered places, and how much deference the Constitution gives Congress when it enforces the Fifteenth Amendment, which expressly grants Congress power to enforce the right to vote by appropriate legislation. In her view, the Court had substituted its own judgment of current conditions for a careful judgment made by the elected branches.

I think the dissent has the better of the argument, and what happened next is the best evidence for it.

What happened when the lights went out

The changes came quickly and they came in many forms, some large and some small enough that they were barely noticed.

Voter ID and omnibus laws. Texas's ID law took effect that afternoon. North Carolina's legislature, weeks after the ruling, passed a sweeping election law that required photo ID, cut a week of early voting, ended same-day registration during early voting, and ended out-of-precinct voting and preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. In 2016 a federal appeals court struck down the main provisions, finding that they had targeted Black voters "with almost surgical precision." That ruling stands as the most vivid judicial description of what preclearance had been preventing.

Polling place closures. Without the requirement to justify changes in advance, counties in formerly covered states closed polling places in large numbers. A study by a coalition of civil rights groups counted well over a thousand closures in formerly covered jurisdictions in the years after the ruling. Some closures had ordinary explanations, such as consolidating precincts or moving to vote centers. Others moved polling places farther from Black and Latino neighborhoods. Under preclearance, each one would have needed a justification before it took effect. After Shelby County, voters had to discover the change and sue.

Purges. Several researchers, including those at the Brennan Center for Justice, found that formerly covered jurisdictions removed voters from the rolls at higher rates than other jurisdictions after the ruling. Maintaining accurate rolls is a legitimate task, and some purges are entirely routine. The problem is that a purge done badly removes eligible voters who often learn it only when they arrive to vote.

Local changes nobody sees. The quietest effect may be the largest. Preclearance covered every local jurisdiction in the covered states, including school boards, city councils and county commissions. A switch from district elections to at-large elections, a change in a city's boundaries, the redrawing of a school board map: these are the kinds of changes that can dilute minority voting power in a small place without ever making national news. Since 2013 they have needed no advance review.

What was left: Section 2 and lawsuits after the fact

After Shelby County, the main federal tool left was Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which applies nationwide and lets voters and the Justice Department sue over practices that deny or dilute the right to vote on account of race.

Section 2 is powerful, and it has won important cases since 2013. But it works in the opposite direction from preclearance. The burden is on the voters who sue. Cases can take years, cost a great deal in expert analysis, and often conclude after one or more elections have already been held under the challenged rules. A discriminatory polling-place change in a county of twenty thousand people may never be worth the price of a federal lawsuit, even if it is plainly wrong.

The Court has also narrowed Section 2 since then. In 2021, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, it set out guideposts that made challenges to voting rules harder to win, and in 2026 its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais narrowed how the law can be used to require districts drawn to give minority voters a fair chance. You can follow those rulings through our coverage of the courts and the ongoing fights over voting rights and redistricting.

The fix Congress keeps not passing

The Court told Congress to write a new formula. Congress has tried. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the Georgia congressman and civil rights leader who was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, would create a new coverage formula based on recent voting rights violations, so that states and localities with a fresh record of discrimination would be covered and others would not. The House passed versions of it in 2019 and 2021. In the Senate, it ran into the filibuster, and an effort in January 2022 to change the Senate's rules to pass it failed.

The opposing case today is mostly the Court's case: that federal oversight of state elections should be rare, that any formula will be accused of partisan targeting, and that existing law already lets voters sue. The response is that a formula tied to recent violations is the opposite of punishment for history; it covers places based on what they have done lately, which is exactly what the Court asked for.

As of late 2026, after Democrats won both chambers of Congress in November, restoring preclearance is again among the bills voting rights groups are pressing for when the new Congress meets in January 2027. Whether it can pass, and whether a president would sign it, are open questions, and nobody should promise an answer.

What you can do

Preclearance put the burden on governments. Without it, the burden falls on voters and the people who watch out for them. Here is how to carry some of it.

• Check your registration well before every election. The voting page lists registration deadlines, voter ID rules and mail and early voting for every state, linked to each state's election office. Check again a few weeks before you vote; purges happen.
• Watch your local election board. Polling-place changes, precinct consolidations and map changes are usually approved at public meetings of county election boards and city councils. Attend, ask why, and ask for the data.
• Ask your members of Congress about restoring preclearance. Find your representative and senators, with contact forms and their latest votes, on the representatives page, and ask where they stand on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
• Follow the Court. The court watch page carries the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's own summaries, along with the emergency docket, where many election cases are decided on short notice.
• Volunteer as a poll worker or with a voting rights group. The organizations directory lists voting and civil rights nonprofits in every state that train poll monitors and help voters who have been turned away.