A federal appeals court has struck down a key path for enforcing the Voting Rights Act.
The legal dispute is focused on who is allowed to sue to try to enforce key provisions under Section 2 of the landmark civil rights law, which was first passed in 1965.
U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, ruled in February 2022, however, that only the head of the Justice Department, the U.S. attorney general, can bring Section 2 lawsuits and dismissed an Arkansas redistricting case brought by advocacy groups representing Black voters in the state. On Monday, that lower court ruling was upheld in a 2-1 vote by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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