GWorks interviews: Ari Berman (Excerpt)

Chief Justice John Roberts says, “‘History didn’t end in 1965.’ But, what he misses is that voter suppression didn’t end in 1965, either . . . .  This particular part of the Voting Rights Act that he didn’t like, Section 5, it blocked 3000 discriminatory voting changes from 1965 to 2013.”

In this excerpt from the four-part GOVERNINGWorks interview, Ari Berman discusses how the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 relates to the Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

In GWorks Interviews: Ari Berman, Berman discusses his background; covering voting rights; the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), culminating in Shelby County v. Holder; the 2013 decision striking down the VRA’s “coverage formula”; the means the law used to identify states subject to voting rights regulation by the federal government; and what voting rights will look like in the 2016 election and beyond.

Ari Berman is the Senior Contributing Writer at The Nation and author of Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Aug. 4, 2015)).