Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act — Provisions and Senate Vote

The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act is a combined federal voting rights bill that would set national standards for how federal elections are run and rebuild the preclearance system the Supreme Court dismantled in 2013. It packages two separate bills — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — into one measure. The House passed it as H.R. 5746 in the 117th Congress, but the Senate blocked it on January 19, 2022, when a motion to end debate failed 49–51 and a follow-up rules change to bypass the filibuster failed 48–52.¹² The two halves have since been reintroduced separately, most recently in 2025.

What the Freedom to Vote Act Half Would Do

This portion of the bill sets nationwide minimum standards for federal elections in four areas: voter access, election security and administration, redistricting, and campaign finance.

Voter Access

Every state would have to offer automatic voter registration through motor vehicle agencies, online registration, same-day registration, and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds. States would provide at least two weeks of early in-person voting including weekends, no-excuse mail voting with ballot tracking, and accessible drop boxes. Election Day would become a federal holiday. In states that require voter ID, a uniform national standard would allow a broad range of documents in hard copy or digital form; the bill does not require states without ID laws to adopt them. Federal voting rights would be restored to citizens who have completed prison terms for felony convictions.³⁴

Election Security and Protection for Election Workers

Voting systems would have to produce voter-verified paper records, and states would conduct post-election audits under defined procedures, with federal grants to help pay for compliant equipment. Local election administrators could sue if they are removed for reasons other than gross negligence or malfeasance. The bill creates federal criminal penalties for intimidating election workers, expands penalties for altering or destroying ballots and records, and lets individuals sue officials who unreasonably refuse to certify results. It also prohibits distributing false or misleading information intended to keep voters from casting ballots.⁵

Redistricting

The bill bans partisan gerrymandering in congressional maps and prohibits mid-decade redistricting. It creates a federal cause of action allowing courts to hear partisan gerrymandering claims, reversing the Supreme Court’s 2019 holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that such claims were nonjusticiable “political questions.” Map-drawing would require transparency and public participation.⁶⁷

Campaign Finance

The campaign finance section folds in three earlier bills — the DISCLOSE Act, the Honest Ads Act, and the Spotlight Act. Entities spending $10,000 or more on campaign-related advertising in a cycle would have to disclose donors giving $10,000 or more, with trace-back rules to prevent laundering money through intermediary groups. LLCs and shell companies spending over $10,000 on campaign activity would have to disclose their beneficial owners. Online platforms with at least 50 million unique monthly users would maintain searchable public archives of political ads, including targeting data and costs.⁶

The bill expands the criteria under which nominally independent super PAC spending is treated as coordinated with a campaign, subjecting it to contribution limits. It extends the statute of limitations for civil and criminal campaign finance violations from five to ten years. A voluntary “Democracy Credit” program would give individuals $25 vouchers to allocate to House candidates, and a small-donor matching program would amplify grassroots contributions.⁶

What the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act Half Would Do

The second half rebuilds the federal preclearance framework that once required certain jurisdictions to get federal approval before changing their voting rules.

A New Coverage Formula

The bill replaces the old Section 4(b) formula with one keyed to recent, documented discrimination. A state becomes subject to preclearance if it has accumulated 15 or more voting rights violations in the preceding 25 years, or 10 or more if at least one was committed by the state itself, or three or more if the state administers elections in the jurisdictions where the violations occurred. Counties, cities, and school districts can be covered on their own if they have three or more violations in 25 years.⁸

A “voting rights violation” is defined broadly to include final judgments finding race-based denial of voting rights, denials of preclearance by a federal court, objections interposed by the Attorney General, and consent decrees or settlements that alter a challenged practice. The Attorney General updates the list of covered jurisdictions annually and publishes determinations in the Federal Register. Coverage lasts ten years, and a jurisdiction can be released if it keeps a clean record.⁹

Practice-Based Preclearance

Some voting changes trigger preclearance nationwide regardless of a jurisdiction’s history. Those include creating at-large districts in areas with significant minority populations, altering district boundaries in ways that affect those populations, imposing new or stricter voter ID requirements, reducing or relocating polling places or early voting in areas with large minority populations, cutting multilingual voting materials, and facilitating removal of voters from the rolls in those areas.¹⁰

Rewriting Section 2 After Brnovich

The bill codifies standards for lawsuits brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. For vote-dilution cases it formally adopts the factors from Thornburg v. Gingles. For vote-denial claims it establishes a distinct “totality of the circumstances” test intended to replace the guideposts the Supreme Court set in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. It also imports a “retrogression” standard into Section 2, making it a violation for any voting change to diminish the ability of citizens to participate on account of race, color, or language-minority status. That provision applies retroactively to changes made on or after January 1, 2021.¹¹

The bill explicitly creates a private right of action under the VRA, responding to Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in Brnovich questioning whether one existed, and sets standards for preliminary injunctive relief that make it easier for plaintiffs to obtain. It addresses the Purcell doctrine, under which courts have declined to grant relief close to an election, with a safe harbor: challenges filed within 30 days of a voting change’s adoption or more than 45 days before an election are presumed not to burden election administration.¹¹

Native American Voting Rights

The bill incorporates the Native American Voting Rights Act, formally the Frank Harrison, Elizabeth Peratrovich, and Miguel Trujillo Native American Voting Rights Act.¹² It addresses barriers particular to Native voters, including long distances to polling places and the absence of physical street addresses on tribal lands. States would have to establish polling and registration sites on tribal lands, provide at least one early voting location per precinct on tribal lands for a minimum of 15 days, accept tribal ID cards as valid voter ID, and allow voters on tribal lands to designate a tribal building as their residential and mailing address. Drop boxes on reservations become mandatory, the federal government covers postage for mail ballots returned by tribal members in federal elections, and language-assistance rules are updated to require written materials in all covered Indigenous languages.¹³

The Supreme Court Decisions That Prompted the Bill

The legislation responds to three specific rulings. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court struck down 5–4 the Section 4(b) coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions had to obtain preclearance under Section 5 of the VRA before changing voting rules. With no valid formula, the preclearance requirement became unenforceable, and jurisdictions previously covered moved quickly to adopt voter ID laws, close polling places, and redraw districts that federal reviewers had blocked before.¹⁴

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), the Court upheld two Arizona voting restrictions and set out five “guideposts” for evaluating Section 2 claims that made those cases harder to win. Among them: how far a challenged law departs from “standard practice” in 1982, and whether a state’s interest in preventing fraud outweighs evidence of racial disparities. Critics argued the ruling ignored Congress’s 1982 amendments, which had refocused Section 2 on discriminatory results rather than discriminatory intent.¹⁵¹⁶

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court held that federal courts cannot decide partisan gerrymandering claims because they are nonjusticiable political questions. The Freedom to Vote half of the bill is designed to reopen that door with a federal statutory cause of action.⁶

Why the Bill Carries John Lewis’s Name

John Robert Lewis served in the U.S. House from 1987 until his death on July 17, 2020. Before Congress, he chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966. On March 7, 1965 — Bloody Sunday — Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to protest the denial of voting rights to Black citizens. State troopers attacked the marchers with tear gas and batons, and Lewis suffered a severe head injury. The national reaction fed directly into passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lewis lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda after his death, and the bill was named to link modern voting rights work to the movement he helped lead.¹⁷

What Happened in the Senate

The combined bill’s decisive moment came on January 19, 2022. The Senate voted on ending debate and advancing H.R. 5746 past the 60-vote filibuster threshold; the motion failed 49–51, with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer switching his vote to “no” to preserve the option of bringing it back.¹ Democrats then moved to change Senate rules to allow a “talking filibuster” that would have permitted the bill to pass by simple majority after extended debate. That motion failed 48–52, with Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema joining all 50 Republicans in opposition.²

Where the Legislation Stands Now

The combined bill has not been reintroduced as a single package since the 117th Congress, but its two halves continue to move separately. In the 119th Congress, Representative Terri Sewell reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as H.R. 14 on March 5, 2025; it was referred to the House Judiciary Committee, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries among the cosponsors.¹⁸ Senator Dick Durbin introduced the Senate companion, S. 2523, on July 29, 2025, with 46 cosponsors, and it was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.¹⁹ With Republicans controlling both chambers, neither bill is expected to reach a floor vote in the near term.

How Supporters and Opponents Frame the Debate

Supporters, including a coalition of more than 230 organizations led by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argue the preclearance system worked. During the decades Section 5 was enforceable, 99.86 percent of submitted voting changes received Justice Department approval, which they cite as evidence the process was not burdensome for jurisdictions acting in good faith. They point to at least 34 restrictive voting laws enacted across 19 states in 2021 alone as evidence federal oversight is still needed.²⁰

Opponents call the bill a federal takeover of state election authority. They argue preclearance imposes heavy administrative costs on state and local governments even for routine decisions like moving a polling place, that the coverage formula relies on vague criteria that invite lawsuits, and that racial discrimination in voting is no longer widespread enough to justify reinstating federal supervision.²⁰

1
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Congresswoman Gwen Moore. H.R. 4 John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
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Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Section by Section Analysis, Senate John Lewis VRAA
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Campaign Legal Center. John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act Protects Native Americans Voting Rights
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NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Shelby County v. Holder Impact
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Harvard Law Review. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee
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Brennan Center for Justice. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee
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History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Representative John Lewis
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GovInfo. H.R. 14 Introduced in House
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Congress.gov. S. 2523, John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2025
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Brennan Center for Justice. Debunking False Claims About the John Lewis Voting Rights Act