The Justice Department issued the following statement from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on the 59th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act:

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law 59 years ago in the wake of a generations-long struggle to make real the promise of the 15th Amendment: that no American citizen be denied the right to vote on account of race.

The Act gave the Justice Department some of its most powerful tools to protect the right to vote.

Between 1965 and 2013, the Department was able to block more than 3,000 restrictive voting changes in jurisdictions with a history of suppressing the vote because of the law.

But court decisions in recent years drastically weakened the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Since those decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative measures that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect the representatives of their choice.

The Justice Department is not standing down in the face of those restrictions. We are challenging discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot. We are working to block discriminatory redistricting plans. We are working with jurisdictions to ensure that their voting centers are accessible to voters with disabilities. We are defending the constitutionality of several Voting Rights Act provisions, including the prohibition on voter intimidation. And we continue to urge Congress to restore the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that courts have weakened, to ensure that we have the authorities we need to protect voting rights.

At the same time, efforts to undermine the right to vote have expanded to include a disturbing rise in threats of violence against the citizens we rely on to fairly administer voting — state and county elected officials, career administrators, and even volunteer poll workers.

The Justice Department has used and will continue to use every authority we have to protect the right to vote, and to protect the public servants who make voting possible. We are aggressively investigating and prosecuting threats of violence targeting election workers, officials, and volunteers.

While there are many things open to debate in our country, the right to vote must not be one of them. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all others flow. The Justice Department will never stop working to ensure that every eligible voter can cast a vote that counts.”