Petition: Media Must Name SCOTUS Rulings Voter Suppression

The Supreme Court has now dealt two major blows to the Voting Rights Act in a matter of months. First, its conservative supermajority gutted Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in redistricting. Now, by declining to review a lower court ruling, the Court has stripped voters with disabilities and limited English proficiency in seven states of a key legal protection — effectively eliminating the private right to sue to enforce Section 208 of the Act. With the Justice Department under Trump unlikely to fill that enforcement void, minority voters across the country are being left without meaningful recourse.

Yet too much media coverage frames these decisions as dry legal developments — procedural moves by the Court rather than what they actually are: a systematic dismantling of the protections that millions of Americans depend on to cast a ballot. When decades of voting rights enforcement are erased piece by piece, and the only remaining path runs through a Justice Department that has shown no interest in protecting minority voters, journalists should be calling that voter suppression — not just jurisprudence.

We call on The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, The Washington Post, and other major outlets to cover the Supreme Court's ongoing erosion of the Voting Rights Act as the voter suppression crisis it is — connecting each ruling to its real-world consequences for Black, Latino, Indigenous, disabled, and non-English-speaking voters. The public deserves reporting that names what is happening, not just how it happened.