The Ballot and the Bridge: What the Voting Rights Crisis Reveals About US Civic Infrastructure

May 19

By Bithiah Carter, President & CEO, Give Black Alliance

On May 16, 2026, hundreds of people crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge again.

The march began at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, the same sacred ground where the planning and the praying happened sixty-one years ago. People from across the country gathered for a day of prayer, speeches, and demonstration under the banner of All Roads Lead to the South. More than twenty members of Congress walked with them. Similar solidarity actions took place nationwide.

The first march, in 1965, produced a demand and a law. The demand was direct: include us in the democracy you claim to believe in. The law was the Voting Rights Act, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. The second march, in 2026, was made necessary by that Act’s dismantling. That is not progress interrupted. It is something more serious: the exposure of a democracy that was never fully built.

Terri Sewell said it plainly from the pulpit:

“Voting rights are not partisan. Voting rights are fundamental to this democracy. This is not about Black voters. This is about every voter.”

Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of Fair Election Systems, named the stakes directly:

“We’re going to finish that fight. The fight that we’re here to finish is the fight for permanent voting rights in this country.”

The second march does not call only for the protection of the Black ballot. It reveals the breakdown of the civic infrastructure that was supposed to make the ballot matter for everyone. That is the crisis this moment demands we name.

Where Is the Bridge to Democracy?

To understand what happened on April 29, 2026, you have to understand what happened on June 25, 2013.

In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court gutted Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provisions that required states with a documented history of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their election laws. The Court declared Section 4 unconstitutional, which rendered Section 5 inoperable. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent named the logic plainly: throwing out preclearance when it is working is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. Shelby removed the preventive architecture of voting rights protection.

What remained was Section 2, the remedial provision allowing courts to strike down discriminatory voting laws after they had caused harm. It was a weaker, reactive tool, but it was the last structural protection standing.

Louisiana v. Callais, decided April 29, 2026, removed that, too. The 6-3 ruling decimated Section 2 by permitting racial vote dilution to survive constitutional scrutiny when framed as partisan politics, even when the racial impact is unmistakable. As Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

Shelby took the roof. Callais took the foundation. Together, in thirteen years, the Supreme Court methodically disassembled the legal infrastructure that housed the voting rights protection the civil rights movement bled to build.

The response was immediate. Within days of the Callais ruling, the old Confederate states moved with startling efficiency: stricter voter ID laws, cuts to early voting, removal of Black legislators from committee assignments, and district maps redrawn to crack the Black vote. Texas announced a restrictive voter ID law the same day as the ruling — a law later found to be racially discriminatory. Tennessee eliminated its sole majority-minority House district. Florida passed a redistricting bill the day Callais was decided. Alabama filed an emergency motion to reinstate the map previously struck down under Allen v. Milligan. In Memphis, Black legislators were removed from committees in a direct assertion of punitive political power.

This is not a coincidence. This is a pattern. And it reveals something deeper than a legal setback: a foundational failure in how the United States has always understood democracy itself.

Society is comfortable with framing this as a Black issue. What we are actually witnessing is a more profound problem. The United States has never fully treated democracy as civic infrastructure requiring intentional maintenance, equitable design, sustained investment, and vigorous defense. Instead, we have treated democracy as a philosophical exercise, assuming it will be self-executing. The question worth asking is: self-executing for whom?

In public discourse, democracy is discussed in terms of values, patriotism, freedom, and civic virtue. Those commitments matter. But philosophical commitment alone does not produce democratic outcomes. A society can celebrate democracy rhetorically while its actual systems suppress participation, distort representation, and concentrate power. That is why scholars insist that democracy must be built, maintained, funded, defended, and audited, like any other public infrastructure. When we fail to do that work, we do not get a neutral outcome. We get an unequal one. And the people who designed that inequality benefit from calling it neutral.

The Warning System

This moment is not without precedent. It has a structure, and that structure has appeared before.

Between 1865 and 1877, Black Americans achieved unprecedented political representation, voting access, public officeholding, institution-building, and federal protection of civil rights. Reconstruction was not simply about Black legislators. It was a reconstruction of American politics itself, the active construction of a democratic infrastructure that might actually include all of its people. Like now, the backlash came, and several things happened simultaneously and deliberately: federal enforcement weakened, the Supreme Court narrowed constitutional protections, states reframed racial exclusion using neutral legal language, and the burden shifted onto Black citizens to prove discrimination rather than onto states to justify exclusion.

The parallel to today is structural, not merely symbolic. Voting restrictions are framed as election integrity. Gerrymandered maps are framed as partisan choices. DEI rollbacks are framed as neutrality. Callais makes this explicit: the Court has created a system in which racial vote dilution can survive constitutional scrutiny when framed as partisan politics, even when the racial impact is unmistakable. Formal citizenship remains intact while substantive political power is being systematically withdrawn.

It would be a mistake to assume this is simply history repeating. Jim Crow was explicit, openly racial, legally segregated, and enforced through overt terror. Today’s systems are administratively complex, legally race-neutral on paper, technologically mediated, and justified through procedural language. A literacy test was easy to identify. A predictive voter challenge database is not. Algorithms, district design, AI-assisted voter roll purges, and coordinated disinformation can shape political outcomes without ever uttering a racial slur. The result is a democracy that is technically open but structurally closed — and structurally closed systems, left unaddressed, do not equilibrate on their own. They entrench.

For decades, the United States has supported international election observation as a pillar of democracy-building, promoting transparency in other nations’ elections. The Supreme Court’s decision now turns that observational gaze inward, toward the old Confederate States, where 15 million eligible Black voters stand on the precipice of disenfranchisement. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, enshrines in Article 21 the principle that everyone has the right to take part in the government of their country through freely chosen representatives. The United States helped write that standard. We are now actively undermining it at home.

Black communities have long served as the warning system for justice and democracy in the United States. When our rights contract, it signals that the infrastructure of democracy itself is under threat. The civic discord bearing down on Black communities today will not stay confined to us. It will expand until it reaches everyone.

“The assault is not only on voting rights. It is on the civic infrastructure — the legal organizations, the advocacy groups, the monitoring organizations — that make the defense of voting rights possible. Dismantle the infrastructure, and the maps redraw themselves permanently, without legal challenge, without organized resistance.”

The Philanthropic Bridge to Democracy

We know how to build democratic infrastructure. The question is whether we have the political will and the philanthropic intentionality to be a bridge to a strong civic infrastructure. Or, do we cower in fear of a few loud donor voices?

A new survey of nearly 400 nonprofit CEOs by the Center for Effective Philanthropy warns that the sector is at an existential inflection point and in crisis. That crisis has a legal face. H.R. 9495, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, passed the House in November 2024 and established the governing template: Treasury Department appointees granted unilateral authority to strip tax-exempt status from organizations they designate as supporting terrorism, a designation this administration has applied broadly and without consistent legal grounding. The bill did not pass the Senate, but the enforcement posture it represents is already operational. The organizations under threat from the DOJ and facing funding crises are the same organizations that have historically challenged voting suppression in court and in the field.

This represents some of the most significant threats to Black civic power since the pre-Voting Rights Act era. It is unfolding faster than the philanthropic sector is moving or willing to respond.

Democratic infrastructure is operational, not ornamental. Philanthropy needs to have the courage to create and support a civic infrastructure that is a full ecosystem of accessible voting systems. Philanthropy should help build the bridge of equitably drawn district maps, redistricting accountability, legal defense funds, grassroots organizations, and the social capital, what Black communities have long understood as survival infrastructure, that makes civic participation meaningful at the community level. When these systems fail unevenly, democracy fails unevenly. When they are dismantled deliberately, democracy is dismantled deliberately.

Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 2019 report, Voting Rights Under Fire, documented a field that is “unevenly funded, underfunded, and cyclical.” Resources surge in presidential election years and disappear immediately after. The bridge is constantly under repair, leaving organizations in perpetual reactive mode while the most consequential voter suppression activity happens quietly between elections. That structural problem in philanthropy mirrors the structural problem in democracy itself. Neither corrects without intentional intervention.

Give Black Alliance is naming this publicly because silence is not a neutral position. A philanthropic sector that funds healthcare, education, housing, and economic mobility, and then watches the democratic infrastructure that protects those investments get dismantled without response, is not practicing the love of humanity. It is not practicing philanthropy. It is practicing the avoidance of discomfort.

Three philanthropic actions are needed now, before the 2026 midterm elections end and more maps are signed into law:

Emergency legal funding for redistricting challenges. The maps being drawn in Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina will be contested in court. That litigation requires resources now, not after the 2026 elections have been run on unlawful maps.

Operating support for at-risk civil rights infrastructure. The organizations under threat from the DOJ and facing funding crises are the same organizations that have historically challenged voting suppression in court and in the field. They need unrestricted, multi-year operating support that does not evaporate under political pressure.

Public naming of what is happening. Philanthropy has the platform, the credibility, and the resources to name the redistricting cascade and the anti-nonprofit enforcement campaign as a coordinated assault on democratic participation. That public naming is itself an act of civic infrastructure investment.

Beyond these immediate actions, two structural commitments define what sustained philanthropic investment in democratic infrastructure must look like:

Fund the infrastructure at every level, year-round. Local grassroots organizations are the most underfunded and the most essential. The organizations monitoring local election boards, challenging illegal purges, driving voters to the polls, and canvassing communities that the national media never covers do not have the visibility of large national groups, but they hold the civic infrastructure where it counts. At the same time, large national organizations provide the legal firepower, research capacity, and policy reach that local organizations cannot sustain alone. Both require flexible, multiyear funding that does not arrive six months before an election and vanish six months after. The suppression happens in the off years. The infrastructure must be there to catch it.

Build a coordinated movement, not a collection of competitors. Local and national organizations get more durable results when they coordinate rather than compete for the same funding. Philanthropy has historically incentivized stand-alone victories at the expense of movement coherence. Funders must actively support convening, network-building, and shared legal strategy that connects grassroots organizations to national litigation groups, state coalitions to federal advocacy networks, and local monitors to the legal civic infrastructure that can act on what they find. No funder should be doing this work alone, and no organization should have to fight alone either.

For individuals, the path is equally direct.

Join All Roads Lead to the South. Showing up is a form of political declaration. The body present on sacred ground is itself an argument.

Support local, grassroots voting rights organizations. Find the organizations in your region doing voter protection, redistricting accountability, and civic education between elections. They need resources, volunteers, and sustained attention, not just in November.

Know your rights and engage in redistricting in your community. The maps drawn in the next two years will determine representation for the next decade. That work happens in public hearings that most people never attend. Your presence there is civic infrastructure. Show up.

“Organizing around xAI is less about preventing the repetition of the past and more about intervening in the systems that threaten to bring history’s violence into the present.” ”

— Prism Reports

Back to the Ballot and the Bridge

The people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 understood that democracy is not a destination. It is a practice, a civic infrastructure built and defended by each generation. They bled for a law. We watched that law be taken apart.

The people who crossed that bridge again on May 16, 2026, revealed the breakdown. We understood something the first marchers also knew: the fight is never finished by one march, one law, or one ruling. It is finished, or it is lost, in the civic infrastructure we build between the marches.

All roads lead to the South. And from the South, they lead forward.

Bithiah Carter is President and CEO of Give Black Alliance, a national philanthropy organization whose mission is to inform, reform, and transform philanthropy. Learn more at giveblackall.org.