The Hill has this report on the prospect that Congress might repair Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The old section 4 was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 2013. According to the article, there is significant support among some Republicans in the House for a bill to enact a new section 4.

Section 4 was the part of the Act that determined which parts of the nation are subject to section 5, the pre-clearance requirement. The original act, passed in 1965, said certain parts of the country that seemed to have had a bad record on voting rights must get permission from the Justice Department before changing any election laws. Section 5 is still intact, but it has no practical usefulness if there is no law on which parts of the country should be included in section 5.

The Voting Rights Act has only rarely been useful in stopping restrictive ballot access law changes. In 1966 the Act was used to prevent Mississippi from raising the number of signatures for statewide independents from 1,000 signatures to 10,000. In 1982 the Act was used to prevent Alabama from creating new petition barriers in the spring of the year and expecting them to be implemented for the 1982 election. In 1995, when Alabama again raised the ballot access barriers, from a petition of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote to 3% of the last gubernatorial vote, the Justice Department initially refused to approve the change, and asked the state for a list (covering the last 15 years) of all independent and minor party candidates who were members of a racial minority. The state would have had great difficulty in compiling such a list. Unfortunately, while the state was working on it, someone else in the Justice Department countermanded the original request to the state, and the change was implemented immediately. By then, though, some groups had used the 1% petition for 1996, so the state permitted everyone to continue to use the 1% test for 1996 only, and the law wasn’t implemented until 1997.