Will the Midterms Be Fair? Michael G. Miller on How the Supreme Court Broke the Voting Rights Act

“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller

Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.

That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller, a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris, Miller has written An American Problem, a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics.

The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder, five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy.

FURTHER READING

•   An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris.

•   Shelby County v. Holder (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent.

•   Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title.

•   Kevin T. Morris is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael G. Miller is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice.

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