Whereas voting is one of the single most important rights that can be exercised in our democracy; Whereas over the course of history, various voter suppression laws in the United States have hindered, and even prohibited, certain individuals and groups from exercising this right; Whereas during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Native Americans and Americans who were born abroad, spoke a language other than English, or were formerly subjected to slavery, were denied full citizenship and prevented from voting by English literacy tests; Whereas from 1954 to 1968, minority groups such as African Americans in the South suffered from the oppressive effects of Jim Crow laws designed to prevent political, economic, and social mobility; Whereas African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other underrepresented voters were subject to violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, all White primaries, property ownership tests, grandfather clauses, voter roll purges, and the prevention of former prisoners from voting; Whereas in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to protect the rights of African Americans and other traditionally disenfranchised groups to vote; Whereas in 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, dismantling the preclearance provision in the law that protected voters in States that historically have suppressed the rights of minorities to vote; Whereas since the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been vacated, many States gerrymandered districts have gone unchallenged or have become less likely to be invalidated by the courts; Whereas these gerrymandered districts have been found to have a discriminatory impact on traditionally disenfranchised minorities through tactics that include cracking , diluting their voting power across many districts, and packing , concentrating minority voters’ power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts