protection of the laws, and section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which explicitly bars denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. (B) Congress finds that racial discrimination in access to voting and the political process persists. Voting restrictions, redistricting, and other electoral practices and processes continue to disproportionately impact communities of color in the United States and do so as a result of both intentional racial discrimination, structural racism, and the ongoing structural socioeconomic effects of historical racial discrimination. (C) Recent elections and studies have shown that minority communities wait longer in lines to vote, are more likely to have their mail ballots rejected, continue to face intimidation at the polls, are more likely to be disenfranchised by voter purges, and are disproportionately burdened by excessively onerous voter identification and other voter restrictions. Research shows that communities of color are more likely to face nearly every barrier to voting than their white counterparts. (D) Congress finds that racial disparities in disenfranchisement due to past felony convictions is particularly stark. In 2022, according to the Sentencing Project, an estimated 4,600,000 Americans could not vote due to a felony conviction. One in 19 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.5 times greater than that of non-African Americans. In eight States—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia—more than one in ten African Americans is disenfranchised, nearly twice the national average for African Americans. Congress finds that felony disenfranchisement was one of the tools of intentional racial discrimination during the Jim Crow era. Congress further finds that current racial disparities in felony disenfranchisement are linked to this history of voter suppression, structural racism in the criminal justice system, and ongoing effects of historical