Describe the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

An ideal response would be:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forbids states and cities with a history of discrimination against minority voters from adopting the at-large system for electing council members if the effect would be to dilute the voting strength of these minorities. In a 1980 case, the Supreme Court found that the Constitution forbids only practices adopted or maintained with the intent to discriminate the Court permitted Mobile, Alabama, to keep its seven-decades-old system of choosing city commissioners in at-large elections, even though no black person had ever been elected to the three-person commission, because there was no direct evidence that the system was established with a discriminatory intent. However, Congress rejected this interpretation when it enacted the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 . In the revised Act, voters can challenge a voting scheme, such as at-large elections, by demonstrating that the voting arrangements, based on all the evidence presented, were racially discriminatory in their effects regardless of intent.