Final answer:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 primarily aimed to remove voting restrictions like literacy tests and poll taxes and mandated federal oversight of elections to prevent racial discrimination. The correct answer is option a.
Step-by-step explanation:
The major provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was to remove obstacles to voting, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, and it required the federal government to oversee local elections to ensure that discrimination based on race did not occur. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was a significant legislation that enforced the provisions and intent of the Fifteenth Amendment, which aimed to secure the right to vote for every U.S. citizen regardless of race. It prohibited states and local governments from passing laws or regulations that denied voting rights on the basis of race, which had been a pervasive issue in the Southern states.
The act sent federal examiners to Southern states to register black voters in places where they had been subjected to discrimination. This resulted in a significant increase in the number of African Americans registered to vote. The intervention of the federal government, as stipulated in the Voting Rights Act, was transformative in guaranteeing fair access to the electoral process for previously marginalized communities. However, despite its initial success, later court decisions, including Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, removed some protections, which has had subsequent impacts on voter suppression tactics in certain states.