This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 25th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court today struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that

decided which jurisdictions would be subject to special federal requirements.

Ilia Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute evaluates the ruling.

Today the Supreme Court struck down section 4 of the Voting Rights Act.

This is the coverage formula that determines which states,

localities, and other jurisdictions are subject to Section 5, which require all of those

places whenever they make a change in voting law, election law of any

kind be at voter ID be it moving a polling place from a schoolhouse to a firehouse

to get federal authorization what's called preclearance from the Department of Justice

or a special federal court here in Washington DC.

This was a case originally brought by Shelby County, Alabama, and they made the argument ultimately successful

that the section 5 requirements, the pre-clearance requirements, which were put in as a temporary emergency

measure in 1965, are no longer justified, are no longer constitutionally valid because the

extraordinary circumstances the exceptional conditions as the

Supreme Court called them in a 1966 case upholding section 5 no longer exist. That is, this case is not about

whether individual voting rights can be vindicated. It's not about whether

racial discrimination in voting or otherwise

still exists. It's not even about whether racial discrimination in voting is

more prevalent in the South or in those jurisdictions that are covered by Section 5.

What it's about is whether the exceptional extraordinary conditions

still exist akin to the Jim Crow South, the ingenious devices,

...