The Voting Rights Act is a landmark federal law enacted in 1965 to remove race-based
restrictions on voting. It is perhaps the country’s most important voting rights law, with a history
that dates to the Civil War. After that conflict ended, a number of constitutional amendments were
adopted that addressed the particular circumstances of freed slaves, including the Fifteenth
Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote for all U.S. citizens regardless of “race, color, or
previous condition of servitude.”