The destruction started immediately. After the Supreme Court’s decision, many states wasted no time in passing strict voting constraints, including laws that made it much harder to register to vote, disenfranchising people with prior criminal convictions, and even the comprehensive restructurings of entire state election systems.

 

By 2018, the Pew Charitable Trusts was reporting that “in the years since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, nearly a thousand polling places had been shuttered across the country, many of them in southern black communities. The trend continues: This year alone, ten counties with large black populations in Georgia closed polling spots after a white elections consultant recommended they do so to save money.”

 

… and it’s just gotten worse and worse. Since 2013, at least 31 states have enacted 114 restrictive voting laws. Between the 2020 and 2024 elections alone, at least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws. This accounts for over two-thirds of all restrictive laws enacted since Voting Rights Act was decimated by the Supreme Court.