The history and potential future of the Voting Rights Act in Arizona

The U.S. Supreme Court last week struck down a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in a case out of Louisiana.

The part of the law in question deals with creating so-called "majority-minority" congressional districts; in the immediate aftermath, Louisiana and some other southern states are now in the process of redrawing their congressional maps — the likely outcome is the elimination of seats in which the majority of voters are Black.

Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen has said GOP lawmakers plan to file a lawsuit challenging Arizona’s congressional maps; those maps here, of course, are drawn by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.

To sort through the Voting Rights Act’s history and potential future, Chad Westerland, an associate professor of political science in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, joined The Show.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Chad, the Voting Rights Act has kind of an interesting history here in Arizona. It seems as though maybe the state wasn’t top of mind when the VRA was passed in 1965, but maybe it wasn’t super far to the back of mind either?

CHAD WESTERLAND: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, there were three counties in Arizona that were covered for using literacy tests in the past. But it was very much thought of primarily as Southern states in Black-white racial terms in, with respect to racial discrimination in voting after the passage of the 15th Amendment.

So there was initial coverage of Arizona in the Voting Rights Act, but that actually ended fairly quickly. There’s an opt-out process for the VRA, and the counties that were covered were uncovered by 1966, 1967.

So as we sort of think about sort of the history of the VRA in Arizona — and I think this is kind of true nationwide — that it was conceived of not solely but primarily as a remedy to these violations in Southern states with respect to voting.

MARK BRODIE: So was it seen maybe as more of a deterrent in a place like Arizona? Like, OK, we know you’re not necessarily doing all this stuff now. Don’t start.

CHAD WESTERLAND: Yeah, no, I think it was thought that there were the use of some of the discriminatory tools that were present in other places — like literacy tests were what got Arizona initially covered.

But one of the really interesting things about the VRA is that it has always had sunset provisions built into it, and the length of those have varied over time. But it wasn’t very long, so the VRA was basically five years and then extended longer. And one of the extensions in 1972 covered places that had discriminated, that had not made voting materials eligible in languages other than English if you had a large enough population to sort of trigger that requirement.

And so what gets Arizona fully covered as a state by 1975 is this predominantly — it’s the language requirements. And I don’t think the Congress was really sort of thinking about that in 1965. It was one of the things that they learned as they were kind of continually thinking about what the VRA meant, how it was applying, where it should apply, what problems we needed to solve.

And so Arizona’s coverage starting in the middle of 1970s was really more sort of new information for Congress, just a problem they hadn’t really thought about when the VRA was originally passed.

MARK BRODIE: Is it safe to say that one of if not the biggest impacts on Arizona from the Voting Rights Act was the pre-clearance provision, where if a state or a municipality was going to make a change in elections it had to be approved, basically, by the federal government?

CHAD WESTERLAND: One hundred percent. And, you know, so what the pre-clearance does is it, any change to your election laws at any level within your state needs to be approved by federal courts before it can go into effect. And Arizona was covered like many other jurisdictions until 2023.

And so what that meant was anytime a map was drawn by the Independent Redistricting Commission in Arizona, just as one example, before that map could even begin to be implemented, it would have to have federal approval before it would go into effect. And so this pre-clearance and sort of this idea of you’re covered by the VRA, that’s what we’re referring to.

And we do need to point out that can happen on a sort of a local level. Most coverage of the VRA is just statewide, but Arizona qualified statewide because of the language requirement — because materials were only available in English and we had a large enough non-English population to get us covered by the VRA.

MARK BRODIE: So you mentioned the Independent Redistricting Commission, and I’m curious to get your perspective on how redistricting, at least on the congressional level, might be impacted by this new Supreme Court ruling dealing with the VRA, given that it’s not the state Legislature that is drawing the maps in this state.

CHAD WESTERLAND: Yeah, it’s — the answer that’s not very satisfying at this point is that it’s unclear. But I do think Arizona is not in the same situation that Louisiana or Alabama is in terms of the minority-majority districts that explicitly have been drawn.

And so what we had before the decision last week was the idea that the Voting Rights Act actually mandated the creation of minority-majority districts in places that are covered by the VRA or that have had sort of issues with historical discrimination with respect to voting.

Arizona doesn’t have a ton of districts that look like that. And at the congressional level, southern Arizona is a perfect example. We have a district that basically goes between the middle of Tucson to Yuma. That’s Adelita Grijalva’s district. That district is a fairly heavily Democratic district kind of regardless of how those lines are drawn. The lines kind of get drawn in the middle of Tucson in these different ways.

So the idea that that district just as an example would go away under a redistricting plan from the Independent Redistricting Commission — it’s really, really hard to see how that could happen. And anything’s possible as we draw these maps, but one of the things that the commission has to do is lay a grid over the state as they sort of start drawing the lines. And so to carve up southern Arizona and especially the current Grijalva district in a way that would put that seat in jeopardy is hard to see.

There’s maybe more that can happen with Maricopa County and Phoenix, it’s just so compact and there’s sort of different ways to draw districts up in Maricopa County, but an immediate effect like what we’re going to see in Louisiana, I don’t see that before 2030 in Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: Which is when the next redistricting would be happening anyway, right? After the 2030 census.

CHAD WESTERLAND: Correct. So what could happen —and we’ve seen these statements already from the state Legislature that they’re going to look into all of their options and challenge any potentially district that might be based on race.

I do need to point out that currently — and this is a little bit unsettled — but using race as a condition in drawing districts is not necessarily unconstitutional. It’s just not mandated under the Voting Rights Act any longer. That could change, certainly, but given the timing involved this, that’s going to be litigation that’s going to take years, not months, to sort of figure out the details on that front.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. Is it possible at this moment to look back and sort of determine what the impact of the Voting Rights Act has been on Arizona?

CHAD WESTERLAND: Yeah, I mean just nationwide, it is hard to capture just how important the VRA has been in terms of just measurable successes. And this is in some ways part of the conversation we’re having over the last 10 or 15 years is the VRA’s a victim of its own success. That we have measurable gains: the gaps in terms of registration rates between Black and white voters in places like Louisiana is radically different in 2026 than it was in 1965.

In Arizona, the progress from the VRA has certainly mattered, but we still have a reasonable gap between registration rates and turnout rates between Latinos in Arizona and whites in Arizona. That’s persisted. It’s not as big as it used to be.

But again, Arizona was also a state that wasn’t — we didn’t have the gap that Alabama or Mississippi had in 1965 in terms of registration rates. And so that’s not to minimize the effect of the VRA, but it’s just we didn’t have to the same extent the structural issues that had persisted in largely Southern states prior to 1965.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Chad Westerland, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona. Chad, thanks so much, I appreciate it.

CHAD WESTERLAND: Thanks, Mark.

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