ALEC States Immediately Implement Voter Restrictions After Shelby County Decision

Within hours of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Shelby County v. Holder decision striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, ALEC-affiliated states began implementing voter suppression laws that had been previously blocked by federal preclearance requirements. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced immediately: “With today’s decision, the State’s voter ID law will take effect immediately.” The speed of implementation revealed that ALEC states had been prepared and waiting for the Court to remove federal oversight.

Texas’s SB 14, which federal courts had determined would discriminate against African American and Latino voters, restricted acceptable voting identification to seven specific documents, affecting an estimated 600,000+ registered voters who lacked compliant IDs. Within two months, North Carolina enacted HB 589, introducing sweeping restrictions including strict photo ID requirements, curtailed early voting, elimination of same-day registration, and restricted pre-registration. Legislative leaders expanded the bill’s scope specifically after Shelby County, transforming it from a narrow photo ID measure into comprehensive voting access rollbacks that a federal court later said targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

The pattern across formerly covered jurisdictions demonstrated systematic preparation. States didn’t need to draft new legislation—they implemented laws already written, often using ALEC model bill language, that had been blocked under Section 5 preclearance. The Brennan Center documented that previously covered states purged voters at significantly higher rates than non-covered areas and enacted multiple restrictive voting laws post-Shelby County.

The immediate unleashing of voter suppression measures proved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissenting warning that striking down preclearance was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm.” ALEC’s decade-long infrastructure building—creating model legislation in 2009, coordinating rollout in 2011, and preparing additional restrictions—meant states could rapidly deploy voter suppression the moment federal oversight ended. This represented the culmination of a coordinated strategy to systematically disenfranchise minority voters, particularly in states with histories of discrimination, using the veneer of “election integrity” to justify restrictions explicitly designed to reduce turnout among Democratic-leaning demographics.