Federal appeals court deals major blow to Voting Rights Act

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A federal appeals court on Wednesday shut down the ability of private individuals to bring Voting Rights Act lawsuits challenging election policies that allegedly discriminate based on race in several states, a major blow to the civil rights law that has long been under conservative attack.

The ruling, which leaves enforcement of the VRA’s key provision to the US attorney general, comes as the Trump Justice Department is gutting its civil rights division and pivoting away from the traditional voting rights work. The DOJ, for instance, dropped major lawsuits previously brought against Texas and Georgia.

The new ruling from the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals covers the seven midwestern states covered in the St. Louis-based Circuit. The opinion means that in those states, only the Justice Department can bring lawsuits enforcing a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, which was passed by Congress in 1965 to address racial discrimination in election policies.

The 2-1 ruling from the 8th Circuit said that a separate civil rights law, known as Section 1983, did not give private individuals the right to bring VRA cases. That question had been left unanswered in a previous ruling from the circuit that said the VRA itself conferred no private right of action.

Those rulings cut against decades of cases successfully brought by individual voters to challenge election policies that violate the VRA by discriminating based on race. Several of the cases traveled up to the Supreme Court and produced rulings affirming the lower court decisions in the voters’ favor, supporting the long-term understanding that the VRA gave private individuals ability to enforce the law with lawsuits.

While some conservative justices have questioned whether such private lawsuits could be brought under the VRA, the high court has never addressed the question directly.

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