The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of Connecticut blazes a path for democracy

Terrance Carroll | 

June was a historic month for democracy and voting rights in America. The United States Supreme Court rejected the radical Independent State Legislature Theory in Moore v. Harper, and preserved what remains of the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition against racial gerrymandering in Allen v. Milligan. June also marked the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). 

Against this backdrop, the Connecticut General Assembly passed this year’s most pro-voter legislation with the adoption of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of Connecticut. The bill includes provisions that:

  1. Require local governments with a history of discriminatory voting practices to obtain preclearance before making certain voting changes.
  2. Provide individual voters with the ability to go directly to state court to challenge discriminatory voting laws.
  3. Improve multilingual language assistance for voters not fluent in English.

In a trailblazing step for a state VRA, the Connecticut legislation explicitly authorizes courts to institute proportional ranked choice voting as a remedy when it has been shown that minority voters have not been able to elect their preferred candidate due to racially polarized voting. As the iconic legal scholar Lani Guinier wrote, “every citizen has the right to equal legislative influence.”1 Proportional ranked choice voting is essential to achieving that end.

With the failure of Congress to pass the federal John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, state-level protections for voters have become increasingly important. It is important that states – like Connecticut, California, New York, Washington, Oregon, and Virginia – have stepped in where Congress failed to act. Over the next few years, more states are likely to adopt state VRAs. However, this is not a long-term solution to protecting the franchise for all. The extent and breadth of a voter’s access to the ballot box should not be determined by that voter’s geographic location.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in 2023 alone, 150 restrictive voting bills were introduced in 32 states. Without the protections provided by the federal Voting Rights Act, this number will certainly increase. As evidenced by the immediate aftermath of the Shelby decision, there are states and lawmakers who are not committed to voters fully exercising their franchise. Within a month of Shelby, the Texas legislature rushed through what was then the nation’s most restrictive voter identification law. Many of the jurisdictions formerly covered have passed similar restrictive voting laws.

The leadership of the Legal Defense Fund, the Greater New Haven NAACP, the ACLU of Connecticut, and others in the passage of the Connecticut VRA is a reminder of the continued importance of what President Lyndon Johnson said when he signed the Voting Rights Acts of 1965: “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by human beings for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison people because they are different from others.”

  1. Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy, 124 (Free Press, 1994).