Funded by private foundations, NAACP, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed VEP to enlarge the right to vote. It operated in the Southern Regional Council (Atlanta) from 1962 to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act (VRA) energized its work. It then worked autonomously through 1968.

The project stressed voter education, registration, and electoral representation of blacks and minorities in the South. Beside reporting on race and voting, it awarded grants to nonpartisan agencies or groups to register disfranchised citizens, $900,000 by the end of 1964 alone. At the same time, grantees, including civil rights activists and canvassers, registered more than 688,000 African Americans, mostly in the Upper South. By 1969 they had added 1,496, 200 more black voters in Deep South states. Their progress owed crucially to VRA, which authorized federal registrars, and to VEP's state projects, which used civics in schools and communities to promote black suffrage and political empowerment.