The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting. It is often considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the U.S. Into the 1970s, Congress continued to improve voting rights, banning poll tests and expanding the Act’s reach to forbid discrimination based on one’s status as a so-called “language minority” — a concept previously used to disenfranchise would-be voters of Latin American, Indigenous, and Asian descent.