This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 1st, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Now that the Supreme Court has thrown out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act,

the Department of Justice is moving to more vigorously apply other provisions of the Act.

Eilia Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

So Section 4 provides the formula for which jurisdictions, states, counties, etc.

are covered by Section 5.

Section 5 imposes what's called a pre-clearance regime,

meaning that before any of these jurisdictions could change any type of election

law, be it redistricting, be it moving a polling station, they had to get approval from the Department

of Justice or a special court in Washington.

Section 5 is currently inoperable because the Supreme Court struck down its coverage formula,

section 4 in that Shelby County case the last week of June. And so now the Holder Justice

Department is figuring out how it wants to proceed in jurisdictions where it

thinks there may be residual voting discrimination.

All right, so what has Eric Holder done without the benefit of congressional action?

Well, he's made a couple of speeches to the NAACP and to the Urban League, spelling out, first of all, that he of course disagrees with

the Supreme Court's ruling and urges Congress to pass a new section four, that is a coverage

formula based on something more recent than voting and registration

statistics from the 60s. But before that happens he is going to use

sections two and three and sorry to get into the weeds and technicalities of this but that's

how this thing works. Section two goes after discrete instances of racial

discrimination in voting or other violations of the Voting Rights Act.

...