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Ovaska, too, is organizing around the South, working to drive community engagement, education, and voter registration.
“We have been here, and we have fought back, and we have won,” she tells TIME. “This is a setback, but this is not going to be the end of building power in the South.”
Pushing to enact new voting rights protections
In addition to mobilizing and educating voters in the South, advocates are calling for lawmakers to pass new legislation protecting voting rights—both on a state and local level and in Congress.
Rhyane Wagner, a director at the media advocacy organization Alabama Values Progress, says that state-level voting rights acts could help counteract the impacts of the court’s decision, though they would apply on a smaller scale than the landmark federal law.
Following the Supreme Court’s Wednesday decision, it will be “really hard to bring a racial discrimination case,” she says, but a state VRA “restores protections” and ensures “that maps with discriminatory impacts remain illegal at the state level.”
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