On August 6, in 1965, US President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote. The bill made it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to deny the vote to blacks.

In 2013, the US Supreme Court essentially gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination at the polls to clear their voting changes with the federal government before those changes went into effect. Since the general election in 2016, 17 million Americans have had their voter registration canceled.