abridgement

Bolden would find that “racially discriminatory motivation is a necessary ingredient of a 15th Amendment violation” and that the 15th Amendment “does not entail the right to have Negro candidates elected, but prohibits only purposefully discriminatory denial or abridgement by government of the freedom to vote.”

In 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to forbid drawing election districts “in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right... to vote on account of race or color.”

As of Friday, even the most severe abridgement of the right to an abortion must be sustained “if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.”

Board member Karin Freeman, who also voted against the ban, called it “misleading” at best and an abridgement of free speech and censorship at worst.

Today, Greenhouse tells us, the key action lies in Section 2, which applies to all states and bars any practice that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”