Senate Judiciary Committee Report on the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1982

The legislative history of the 1982 amendments to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Senate Judiciary Committee Report records Congress’s explicit rejection of the intent test established by City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980) and its adoption of a results test as the statutory standard for proving Section 2 violations. Key passages: at 19, on the original 1965 understanding of Section 2 as reaching discrimination regardless of intent; at 22, that before Bolden plaintiffs could prevail “by showing either discriminatory results or intent”; at 26, characterizing Bolden as “a marked departure from earlier Supreme Court and lower court vote dilution cases”; at 27, that plaintiffs “must either prove such intent, or, alternatively, must show that the challenged system or practice, in the context of all the circumstances in the jurisdiction in question, results in minorities being denied equal access to the political process”; and at 36, rejecting the intent test for three reasons: that the difficulty of meeting it “is not the principal reason why we have rejected it. The main reason is that, simply put, the test asks the wrong question”; that it is “unnecessarily divisive because it involves charges of racism on the part of individual officials or entire communities”; and that it “will be an inordinately difficult burden for plaintiffs in most cases.” At 18, the Committee frames the choice: whether “to have Section 2 continue to be coextensive with the Fifteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, or whether to maintain Section 2 as a provision available in situations where discriminatory intent is not proved.”

Corrected 2026-10-01. This record quoted page 27 as “either the more restrictive intent test or the results test would be sufficient to show a violation.” Those words are not in the Report (the full Westlaw reprint, 264 pages, searched); the record now quotes page 27 as printed. The Westlaw reprint is set in capitals; quotations here are given in sentence case.

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