Dear Friends,
Thank you to everyone who helped make Tuesday’s Primary Election possible. Our poll workers and election officials put in long hours and showed tremendous dedication in keeping our elections fair, smooth, and accessible.
Thank you as well to every candidate who stepped forward to serve our community. Long before Election Day, candidates were out gathering signatures, speaking with voters, and putting in the time and effort that campaigning requires. Running for office takes courage, sacrifice, and commitment, and the willingness of people to serve strengthens our civic life.
And thank you to every voter who participated. Every ballot cast is an investment in our democracy and our future.
This week, as we reflect on another election here in Pennsylvania, I want to discuss the power and promise of voting rights in America, the long struggle to secure those rights, and why protecting them remains so important today.
No discussion about voting rights is complete without recognizing the 15th Amendment, the 19th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Together, these measures transformed American democracy and expanded participation in public life.
The 15th Amendment prohibited states from denying citizens the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” While its ratification in 1870 should have guaranteed voting rights for Black Americans, many states quickly implemented policies designed to suppress minority participation in elections. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, intimidation, racial violence, and all-white primaries became common tools used to disenfranchise Black voters across the South. These practices were led by the state of Mississippi, who saw these as loopholes to the 15th Amendment and to retain white supremacy in the electoral process. Mississippi set the precedent for other southern states to follow these practices.
These policies were devastatingly effective. In many places, literacy tests were imposed after it had been made illegal to teach enslaved people to read. Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation and inequality were sustained in part because millions of Americans were systematically excluded from political participation.
The Civil Rights Movement brought national attention to these injustices. In 1965, voting rights activists marching peacefully from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama were brutally attacked by state police in scenes that shocked the country. Those events helped galvanize public support for federal action.
Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. The Voting Rights Act finally gave the federal government the tools necessary to challenge discriminatory voting laws and practices. In Mississippi alone, Black voter registration rose dramatically within just a few years from 6% to 59%.
The Voting Rights Act recognized something critically important: formal access to the ballot is not enough if governments can manipulate election systems in ways that dilute representation or silence communities. For decades, the law served as one of the nation’s strongest civil rights safeguards, helping ensure that minority voters had a meaningful opportunity to participate equally in our democracy.
The law was later expanded to protect language minorities and improve access for more Americans. But in recent years, important parts of the Voting Rights Act have been weakened by court decisions.
In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) the Supreme Court’s decision eliminated the VRA’s “preclearance” requirement which made states with a history of systematically disenfranchising minority voters (Section 5) get preclearance before making election law changes. Since the Shelby County decision, several states have made law changes which had previously been prevented by Section 5 have been shown to reduce voting participation and have had the impact of inhibiting minority voting efforts.
Section 2 of the VRA prohibited any voting law, policy, or practice that results in discrimination against racial or language minority groups. This included the way electoral districts are drawn. After Shelby County, Section 2 became the primary federal tool for challenging discriminatory voting practices.
One of the central purposes of the Voting Rights Act was to prevent practices that diluted the voting power of minority communities. Even when citizens are legally allowed to vote, representation can still be undermined if district lines are manipulated to weaken the influence of certain groups of voters.
Two of the most common methods used in gerrymandering are known as “cracking” and “packing.”
Cracking occurs when a community is divided across multiple districts so that its voters are consistently outnumbered elsewhere, preventing them from electing candidates of their choice. Packing does the opposite: it concentrates large numbers of voters into a small number of districts, reducing their influence in neighboring districts.
Modern mapping software has made these practices increasingly sophisticated. Legislatures can now analyze voting behavior and demographic information with remarkable precision when drawing district maps.
On April 29th, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais significantly weakened another major protection of the Voting Rights Act related to racial gerrymandering and vote dilution. The ruling increases the burden on plaintiffs challenging discriminatory legislative maps and makes it substantially harder to prove unlawful discrimination in redistricting cases. Justice Alito stated that plaintiffs now must also show that a state is redistricted based on race and not party, which is a difficult thing to prove.
Since the Callais decision we have seen legislatures in many southern states participate in the type of gerrymandering previously prohibited under Section 2 or indicate that they plan to do so. Louisiana seeks to erase one of its majority-black districts (even though voting was already underway) with the Governor suspending voting in the congressional races. Just two weeks after the Callais decision the Tennessee legislature was called into session and in a 48-hour voting marathon redrew its maps, cracking the country’s largest majority black city into three sections that encompass significant rural, mostly white, regions. Florida passed a new map, despite having an anti-gerrymandering “Fair Districts” amendment which Governor DeSantis now argues is nullified. South Carolina moved its congressional primaries to August to allow for new maps to be drawn. Alabama and Mississippi are also working on timelines to redraw their maps. The price tag for multiple primaries, redistricting maps and other engagement is a tremendous burden.
I am personally opposed to both partisan and racial gerrymandering. While both political parties often seek advantages in redistricting, I believe it becomes a race to the bottom that damages public trust in our electoral system. We have seen extremes of this recently, and while I understand the exigency of the response to widespread political gerrymandering, I hate to think we are doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Fair representation is fundamental to public confidence in democracy. Voters should choose their representatives; representatives should not choose their voters.
Research increasingly shows that unfair districting weakens civic engagement. A 2025 peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers at UC Riverside found that Americans view gerrymandering with levels of distrust comparable to other forms of political corruption, like bribery. The study also found that when voters believe electoral outcomes are predetermined, they are less likely to volunteer, donate, or even participate in elections.
Other research from the Brennan Center for Justice suggests that states using independent redistricting commissions often experience stronger voter participation and increased confidence in the electoral process. Competitive districts encourage engagement because voters believe their voices matter and elections are meaningful.
Every generation inherits the responsibility to strengthen democracy for the next. The right to vote has never been self-executing; it has always required vigilance, participation, and the willingness of citizens to defend it. It is a privilege to be a part of this process, and it is not one I take lightly.
That is why I am introducing legislation in Pennsylvania to strengthen protections for voters and help ensure fair representation in our commonwealth. At a time when federal voting protections are steadily being narrowed, states must step forward to protect equal participation and equal representation under the law. I, along with Reps Nelson, Scott, Pielli and Khan circulated a co-sponsorship memo to enshrine a version of the VRA in Pennsylvania at the state level. Our democracy is too important to take for granted that courts will maintain the rights of all citizens to fairly and equally access the ballot box.
Thank you again to everyone who participated in this election and helped make our democracy work.