Rick Hasen notes that a challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that was recently dismissed for lack of standing has been reinstated by the D.C. Circuit, meaning that we could see another challenge to the VRA at the Supreme Court very soon. The challenge involves an attempt by officials in Kingston, North Carolina, to make city elections nonpartisan. Section 5 requires changes to local election practices in certain areas to be "precleared" by the voting section of the Justice Department:
This is a big deal. I and other election law scholars believed that the Kingston case could well be a vehicle for the Supreme Court to finish the job in started in NAMUDNO and strike down section 5 of the VRA. But the standing issues seemed like a big hurdle, and so other cases (like the Shelby County case) have gained more prominence.
The Supreme Court came very close to overturning the Voting Rights Act a few years ago, and the conservatives on the Court all but said that they'd do it given another chance. The argument was basically that since racism is over, there's no reason for the VRA's broad provisions giving the Justice Department authority to veto changes to local election laws if they could be racially discriminatory.
That's silly, but given that the Supreme Court ruled in the recent Wal-Mart case that the company's lack of an explicitly discriminatory policy combined with an express policy against discrimination meant that there's no possible way Wal-Mart could discriminate against women, it's a good bet there are five votes on the Court for this view. There probably isn't a better example of "superficially race-neutral" rules meant to impact particular groups than the history of voting rights in the United States. Chief Justice John Roberts has also made it clear in the past that he sees racially conscious laws meant to remedy discrimination as indistinguishable from laws meant to prevent it.
For what it's worth, I think there's something to the argument that Section 5, because it is confined mostly to the South and other jurisdictions with a "history of discrimination," is a bit anachronistic. But that's because partisan voter-suppression efforts that would have the effect of discriminating against minority voters are diffuse and widespread, not because racism is no longer a problem now that there's a black guy in the White House. If the VRA is overturned, playing partisan dirty tricks with elections is going to get a lot easier.