The Effect of Section 5 on Enfranchisement: Evidence From North Carolina

Section 5of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) required covered jurisdictions— those deemed perniciously politically discriminatory to minorities — to pre-clear changes to their voting practices with the Department of Justice. By exploiting the use of a federally imposed thresh-old for how Section 5 coverage was applied in North Carolina, this paper estimates the effect of coverage using a difference-in-differences design. This paper finds that Section 5 coverage increased black voter registration by 14-19 percentage points, white registration by 10-13 percentage points, and overall voter turnout by 10-19 percentage points. Additional results for Democratic vote share suggest that some of this overall increase in turnout may have come from reactionary whites. This paper finds that Section 5 coverage had a statistically and substantively meaningful effect on enfranchisement; though an effect consistent with the more modest of extant estimates in the literature.