Whereas voting is one of the single most important rights that can be exercised in a 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 the right to vote; Whereas during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Native Americans and people who were born to United States citizens abroad, people who spoke a language other than English, and people who 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 at polling stations, poll taxes, literacy tests, all-White primaries, property ownership tests, grandfather clauses, voter roll purges, and laws that prevented former prisoners from voting; Whereas Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ( 52 U.S.C. 10301 et seq.) 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 formula provision in that Act that protected voters in States that historically have suppressed the right of minorities to vote; Whereas, since the invalidation of the preclearance formula provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, gerrymandered districts in many States have gone unchallenged or have become less likely to be invalidated by the courts; Whereas gerrymandering has a discriminatory impact on traditionally disenfranchised minorities, including by— (1) diluting the voting power of minorities across many districts (known as cracking )