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A few weeks ago, the US Supreme Court announced its Louisiana v Callais decision. The ruling, which was 6-3 and written by the far-right majority of the court, gutted the legal protections to minority voters afforded under the Voting Rights Act. The court specifically gutted the sections of the law that mandated the creation of majority-minority districts when certain conditions were met. The ruling in question had neutered that section of the law thanks to prioritizing partisan redistricting as a legitimate excuse to not draw minority seats.
The result of the ruling is already causing a rush of states in the deep south to draw out a handful of Black-majority districts. The ruling will do tremendous damage to minority protections not only in the south but across the country; as minority voters become nothing but pieces on a game board in partisan redistricting fights.
While much of the coverage has been around the partisan impact of this ruling, I wanted to step back for a moment and look at the VRA law in more detail. The Voting Rights Act is really underappreciated for how transformative the law was. The law is responsible for breaking Jim Crow in the 1960s and 1970s and transforming how we elect our leaders in the 1980s and 1990s. It has since served as a a shield for minority communities against partisan games in the 2000s and onward.
With this law now under threat and severely weakened, I wanted to look back at the VRA and the impact it’s had.
The History of the Voting Rights Act
When talking about the Voting Rights Act, we are not talking about just one piece of legislation passed at one time. The VRA has been amended and reauthorized several times, often changing to address concerns not considered before. I think it's important then to look at how the VRA went from combating “vote denial” and then to “vote dilution.”
Combating Vote Denial
Originally passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act set up federal protections for voting rights; sweeping away many of the old Jim Crow restrictions placed on Black voters in the deep south. Throughout the course of the post-Reconstruction era, the southern states barred Black voters from the polls either with direct violence, intimidation, or legal blockades. Whites-only primaries, literacy tests, poll taxes, and limited registration hours were all used to stop Black citizens from registering or daring to vote. These were all examples of vote denial; a key practice that the VRA was designed to combat. When the act passed Congress, the opposition came largely from the Jim Crow south.
I have written several articles on Jim Crow era voter restrictions. These are largely centered around Florida, which was a firm Jim Crow state. They give a broad understanding of the life under segregation and repression.
The Betrayal of Florida’s freed slaves - An article looking at how reconstruction in Florida sought to limit Black voting power and how ex-confederates eventually took control of the state and began Jim Crow
Black Registration in the 1940s - A look at the Florida registration efforts of Harry T. Moore. This examines how Florida began to allow Black registration in the 1940s, but it varied wildly by county, with some violently resisting any efforts. Moore and his wife were eventually killed by the KKK.
The Voting Rights Act in Florida - Breaking down how the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally sparked major registration drives in counties that had resisted efforts before. Florida was not as repressive as Alabama or Mississippi, and this article delves into its own county-by-county differences.
Jim Crow and the move of Black voters to Democrats - A detailed look at the horror of Jim Crow and the period of the 1940s to 1960s that saw shifting voting patterns as Democrats began to embrace civil rights and Republicans moved in the opposite direction.
The VRA and its vigorous enforcement eventually secured much stronger rights for voters to register and cast ballots. Black registration and turnout began to increase across the south. An excellent breakdown of its effects can be seen here. In Florida, the VRA saw major spikes in registration in rural white counties. In Liberty County, for example, Black registration went from 0 to 177 after the law passed.
A decade earlier in Liberty, an effort of 12 Black individuals trying to register to vote led to cross burning and threats of violence. With the law and its enforcement by federal officials, Black voters finally had the right to even cast ballots in Liberty.
The VRA had impacts across the country; from urban cities to smaller rural towns. However, as voting practices increased, there were still many issues to address.
Redistricting and Vote Dilution
The other key component of the VRA was its fight against what is known as “vote dilution” - which is an election practice being implemented that weakens the voting strength of a community, even if that community now has the right to cast a ballot.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act governs this issue and aims to protect racial minorities by baring either election maps or methods of election that harm the ability of that minority community from having a say in electoral politics. This section covers election administration issues, like multi-language ballots and how precincts are assigned, but for this article we will stick to redistricting-related matters.
The VRA took aim at several ways that a minority community could see its electoral influenced diminished in redistricting. These include….
Packing Voters - Lumping a minority community into as few districts as possible to keep them from influence other districts.
Example: A county in South Texas may be able to draw two 60% Hispanic commission districts. Instead they lump everyone together to get one 90% Hispanic district.
Cracking Voters - Spreading a minority community across several districts, with no district having a large enough minority block that they can influence the election.
Example: Black voters in Memphis are large enough to make up 60% of a Congressional District. Instead they are split between three different seats, each with just 20% Black population.
Use of At-Large Voting - If a racial minority could never win countywide/ citywide elections, but could make up the majority of a single-member district, then moving away from at-large voting was often ordered.
Example: In Osceola County Florida in 2006, the Hispanic population was 35% and clustered in the north of the county. At-Large elections always saw white candidates win. The commission was ordered to move to districts; which include a compact majority-Hispanic seat in the north of the county.
The law opened up states, counties, and cities to be sued if their election methods and redistricting systems were designed to keep minority communities from influencing politics.
The Fight Against Minority Representation
While the Voting Rights Act set out parameters to aid in minority representation in legislative bodies, there was no shortage of resistance to these developments. Parties in power across the states sought to protect their own incumbents against insurgent minority candidates. In these efforts, they turned to any map-making method they could to maintain the status quo.
One common tactic for limiting minority voices, which is much rarer today, was the use of multi-member districts. These systems, where a larger district was drawn but it elected multiple members, was often designed to keep districts from being small enough to be dominated by a specific community. This sentiment was perfectly summed by in 1976 by white Miami-Dade State Senator George Firestone, who argued against moving away from Florida’s use of multi-member districts.
[We’d be replaced by] “a senior citizen representative, a black community representative, a condominium representative, and a Cuban-American representative”
The sentiment of Firestone was not uncommon across much of the south, and indeed other parts of the country. The argument for multi-member districts was that it would reduce specific factional politics. However, the key reason minority communities clamored for their own districts was because they felt their issues were not being listened to. Having a proper seat at the table was paramount for ensuring community-specific issues got addressed.
While multi-member districts fell out of favor by the 1980s, with Florida agreeing to abandon it as public pressure grew, “cracking” became the common method to limit minority voices. Here again Florida has a good example to draw from.
Up in the Tallahassee area, Black voters asked for majority-Black Gadsden County to be united with the Black community of southern Tallahassee; which would have formed a majority-Black State House seat. The panhandle area was, and still is, known for severe racially polarized voting, and Black voters struggled to make inroads with white voters. However, lawmakers instead passed a map that specifically kept these two large black communities in separate districts.
Here the goal was to use Black voters to shore-up white Democrats in both of these seats. The specific call from Black voters, who had only been given the right to vote a few decades earlier, was ignored. You can read my article about the 1980s Florida redistricting process here.
These were the type of map issues that minority voters had to constantly deal with; and it happened across the country. Whether it was rural white politicians in the south, or city political machines in the north, minority voters continued to be used as pawns in redistricting fights.
Adding the “Results Test” in 1982
The 1970s had initially seen a flurry of lawsuits over redistricting practices that hampered the ability of minority communities to elect candidates of their choice. However, in the 1980 Supreme Court case of Mobile v Bolden, the court said that for discrimination claim to be brought forward under the VRA, discriminatory intend needed to be clear. It wasn’t enough that the map or method of voting had a clear negative affect on minority voters; you needed proof of racism being the driving force.
The Mobile case was seen as a major blow to the Voting Rights Act. Proving discrimination was hard, as politicians would not openly state their map decisions were designed to limit minority representation. Excuses about geography or partisan considerations were shields from racial discrimination suits. The court case was not the end of the VRA, however. Instead Congress resulted to update the law to give it stronger teeth.
The 1982 amendments to the VRA saw Congress implement a “results test” to override the issue of intent that the Mobile case had addressed. In other words, if the map you passed happens to hurt minority voter influence, regardless of whether you intended that or not, then your map was subject to challenge.
During the 1982 debate, the Senate judiciary committee issued a report to accompany the legislation. The report suggested courts could look at several additional factors to determine if “in totality of the circumstances” a jurisdiction was subject to a VRA suit. These factors, taken directly from the DOJ website, were…
the history of official voting-related discrimination in the state or political subdivision;
the extent to which voting in the elections of the state or political subdivision is racially polarized;
the extent to which the state of political subdivision has used voting practices or procedures that tend to enhance the opportunity for discrimination against the minority group, such as unusually large election districts, majority-vote requirements, and prohibitions against bullet voting;
the exclusion of members of the minority group from candidate slating processes;
the extent to which minority group members bear the effects of discrimination in areas such as education, employment, and health, which hinder their ability to participate effectively in the political process;
the use of overt or subtle racial appeals in political campaigns; and
the extent to which members of the minority group have been elected to public office in the jurisdiction.
The 1982 amendment would prove to be a watershed change in redistricting law, setting up several states, counties, and cities to restructure their elections.
Subsequent Supreme Court cases would further shape the the voting rights law. The 1986 case of Thornburg v Gingles is a groundbreaking case. In that ruling the court laid out when the Voting Rights Act could be used to challenge election maps/systems.
The racial/language minority is large enough and compact enough to make up a majority of a single member district
The minority group is politically cohesive (aka they can/do vote as a block)
The majority racial block often votes as a unit to deny the minority candidate of choice victory in elections.
The final piece of the Gingles test is important, as it made clear the VRA only concerned areas where a minority district was the only way for a minority community to get a candidate of their choice into office. If a state, county, or city had shown that racial-block voting is not a major issue, then a VRA suit would fail.
There was no shortage of areas, however, where VRA suits were very successful.
Early Map Changes
With the 1982 amendment passing so close to redistricting time, many of the map changes of the decade came from individual lawsuits.
Mississippi, for example, was home to many lawsuits challenging at-large election methods across cities and counties. Included in these lawsuits was a challenge to the Congressional map layout. In 1983, a federal court mandated a redraw of the Congressional lines, drawing a firm majority-Black seat in the delta region.
In 1986, Mike Espy would win election from this district to become the state’s first Black congressman since Reconstruction.
Additional Congressional redraws took place in Louisiana. In 1984, a majority-Black seat was drawn inside Orleans Parish. This seat was actually won by Lindy Boggs, a white Congresswoman who was a firm Civil Rights ally. Boggs won re-election in the newly-drawn seat thanks to winning large chunks of the Black vote.
The Louisiana results actually reinforce an important point about the VRA. This was not about ensuring a Black candidate won. It was about giving the Black community a united voice to elect a candidate of their choice. While Israel Augustine likely narrowly won the Black vote, he did not do so by a wide margin. Boggs was a strong Black ally and any white candidate hostile to Black voters would not win such a seat. Hence the district gave power and weight to Black voters, even as Boggs remained Congresswoman. When Boggs then retired in 1990, the seat was won by William Jefferson, who became Louisiana’s first Black Congressman since reconstruction.
Local Election Changes
While we view the VRA largely as an issue around Congressional districts, the VRA has effected far more down-ballot office elections than it has Congressional. Issues like at-large voting for city council or county commission districts have been debated and challenged in hundreds of VRA suits.
For example, the 1980s-1990s saw a shift away from at-large county commission races in the panhandle of Florida. Many of these counties had sizeable Black minorities, up to 30-40%, but data showed white voters would not vote for the candidate of choice of the Black community. The result was orders to go to single-member districts to give Black voters the ability to have a commissioner speaking for them.
The changes in North Florida were specific to communities with racial-block voting. While many cities were also ordered to go to district-level elections, Tallahassee notably was not. This was because by the mid 1980s, a liberal college town like Tallahassee was showing less racial-block voting and electing the candidate of choice for Black voters. Tallahassee hence was never sued about going to a district-system.
These changes were not just about white vs Black in the south. Lawsuits and map challenges occurred across the country and over different racial dynamics. In Dade County, a legal battle finally paved the way for county commissioners to be elected at the district level. In Dade, whites had dominated elections thanks to strong financial backing and massive turnout disparities. Despite being just 30% of the county population, whites held 7 of 9 county seats. The 1993 special elections ordered under a district map resulted a fundamental reorganization of county government.
One area I have written about when it comes to local elections and the Voting Rights Act was San Juan County, Utah. This low-populated county is nearly evenly split between white and Navajo citizens. It has struggled with decades of racial strife and open discrimination against the Navajo. The county went to single-member districts under a court order decades ago, but the last 10 to 15 years have seen many back and forth redistricting battles over how to shape its commission seats. You can read backstory on this saga here.
While we think of the VRA around the drawing of legislative or Congressional elections, the affect down-ballot truly cannot be overstated.
The 1990s and Map Limitation
The 1992 redistricting process was a seminal year for the history of the Voting Rights Act. The mapping process, the first held after the 1982 amendments were implemented, also came at a height of computer technology that allowed for far more precise mapping. While some suits forced district changes in the mid-decade period, it was when every state had to redraw its lines after the 1990 census that the full effect of the VRA would be felt. Several states were going to be ordered to draw districts that united their minority communities and give them a chance to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.
As states found themselves with new mandates for the creation of minority seats, they also had new technology that could aid such a process. Mapping down to the census block level, and with each state having hundreds of thousands of said blocks, allowed for some very creative maps. This also came as the Department of Justice, under the Presidency of George H W Bush, made it clear to states that they fully intended to implement the racial mandates of the Voting Rights Act.
States like Florida, North Carolina, and Alabama, all with no majority-Black districts at the time but with large Black populations, would be ordered to draw minority seats. States like Texas, Florida, and California, for example, would also be mandated to look at the creation of Hispanic-majority seats. The desire to adhere to DOJ directives also clashed with the desire of partisan actors to protect their incumbents and party prospects. To see how these competing desires played out in Florida, you can check out my articles on the 1992 State Legislative Redistricting and the Congressional redistricting saga in the attached links.
The combination of racial mandates and computer technology, with no real mandates on compactness, led to some of the most bizarre districts ever used. A famous example is the 3rd Congressional District in Florida, drawn by a federal court to be a majority-Black seat after the legislature failed to produce a map.
The district stretches all the way from Jacksonville to Orlando and back over to Gainesville. It essentially “collects” Black voters across North Florida and uses highways to narrowly connect communities. This was a plan to give Black voters a voice in North Florida. However, it was not anything remotely considered a proper community. The Florida 3rd was similar to many bizarre districts that came up in the 1990s. The reflected the wild-west era that mapping was in thanks to the new technology available. These map would also not last through court challenges, however.
States were given further legal clarity when the Supreme Court released two major cases in the mid 1990s. These are the Miller v Johnson and Shaw v Reno decisions. These cases struck down odd-looking districts that court found were drawn with only race in mind. In Miller, the court stated
“a reapportionment plan may be so highly irregular and bizarre in shape that it rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to segregate voters based on race”
In the Shaw case, Justice O’Conner wrote that such race-based districts are subject to strict scrutiny, meaning they must satisfy three conditions: a compelling government interest, narrowly tailored to achieve the goal, and use the least restrictive means to achieve the goal. Maps that based all of their borders purely on race were found to be in violation of the 14th amendment, which guaranteed equality before the law on the basis of race.
Broadly speaking, the court rejected what is known as “racially predominant” redistricting - which means that race was the only logic for why district lines looked they way they did. The court, and I must stress this, DID NOT strike down “racially conscious” redistricting. That method is where race is considered, but other redistricting principles; like natural borders or county lines, are also taken into account.
In other words, the court did uphold the goal of the VRA and its mandates to draw minority districts were possible. However, the VRA was set to safeguard from unfair mapping practices that limited minority voting influence where they otherwise could form minority districts.
These cases forced many district redraws in the 1990s. In some cases, they eliminated the ability to draw a majority-minority seat. However, many changes simply made districts more compact but less packed with a racial minority. Other maps changed some majority-seats to districts with large minority populations. Georgia, for example, originally drew 3 majority-Black districts in 1992; with two looking ugly as sin. A court-ordered Remap for 1996 saw two of the seats become around 35% Black. However, both districts re-elected their Black Congresspeople.
Future cases would further refine what was a permissible district and how much race could be considered. Up to present day districts from congress to city council are argued based on if they are “racially predominant” or merely “racially conscious.” That said, no maps debated today look quite as bizarre as the maps of the 1990s.
The Effect of the Law
The Voting Rights Act and its subsequent 1982 amendment had a massive impact on racial representation in America. By the end of the 1992 elections, the impact of the law was clear. Thanks to court mandates, Congress had 32 majority-Black seats and 19 majority-Hispanic seats. Localities across the nation saw first time representation for Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans.
No graph sums up the effect of the law more than the graph of Black Congresspeople by year. From the end of Reconstruction and to the passage of the 1965 law, no more than half a dozen Black men sat in Congress. By the end of 1992, that number sat at 40.
The 1992 elections saw a massive spike over just two years, a product of the redistricting cycle. In those elections, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Florida elected Black individuals to Congress for the first time since reconstruction.
The law continued to shape representation in all levels of government for decades after 1992. However, the law is not just there to lift up minority voices. It is also there to shield them from partisan fights. This shield has become all too important in recent years.
A shield from Partisan Gerrymandering
When the VRA “results test” was initially passed in the 1980s, many of the states it would affect the most were in the south. At the time, most of these states were actually in the hands of conservative Democrats. While race relations in the south had seen improvement since the civil rights era, and many segregationists being forced out of office or switching parties, there was still a clear sentiment among white leaders that Black voters were secondary in the coalition. This was despite the fact Black voters were the most loyal constituency.
That is why we see maps in the 1980s like the Florida panhandle example from earlier, where Black voters were cracked and used to prop up white districts. The 1990s maps would see white Democrats forced to abandon their cynical effort to use Black voters to secure their own re-elections. While many Democrats at the time would subsequently blame Republican gains on the mandate for minority districts, I discussed this in my article on 1992 Florida Legislative redistricting, and pick apart that myth. The point being, the VRA finally gave Black voters a voice that they would not have gotten despite being in states run by their own party.
Dynamics shifted greatly by the mid 2000s as Republicans began to take control of more and more southern states. The 2010 midterm specifically was a watershed moment, as Republicans took control of almost all southern legislatures. This meant that the 2011-2012 redistricting process in the south would largely be at the hands of Republicans, a dynamic that would repeat in 2021-2022. However, as many of these states worked to gerrymander out any remaining white Democratic members, of which few remained, Black-majority districts could not be touched.
The same protections applied to Black and Hispanic Democrats in the northern states, who could not be cynically used to prop up other districts at the desire of Democratic leaders. Just like Republicans could not carve up Black-majority seats to elect more Republicans, Democrats could not carve up Black/Hispanic city voters to save white incumbents outside of Chicago or New York City.
The 2010s saw gerrymandering become a much bigger topic in American political discourse. I wrote about this time in this article from last year, so check that out for more details on the fight for redistricting reform. To sum things up, many liberal and Democratic groups began to make the push for federal redistricting standards. Republicans, who controlled a majority of state legislatures thanks to the 2010 midterms, controlled redistricting in more states and hence opposed any such reform. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Rucho v. Common Cause that while partisan gerrymandering was anti-democratic, the court would not regulate the issue. The ruling fell on ideological lines, with the four liberal justices in the dissent.
With the courts unwilling to reign in the practice of partisan gerrymandering, minority communities had at least one reprieve. Thanks to the VRA, existing minority districts were shielded and protected from the political games in the map making process. In Mississippi, for example, Republicans could have easily carved up the Black population in the delta region to create four white Republican seats. However, with the 2nd district protected by the VRA, no such cracking took place.
We see a similar story play out in Tennessee. There Republicans resolved to maximize their gerrymander. Two democratic districts remained; a majority-Black seat in Memphis and a white-majority seat Nashville. Republicans carved up the city of Nashville & Davidson County three ways, eliminating that as a Democratic seat.
The result of this change was a map with firm 8 Republican-friendly districts and just one Democratic-district district. However, Republicans made no moves against the Memphis seat, as it was protected by the Voting Rights Act.
We saw the VRA also protect Black voters in Missouri just last year. In 2025, Republicans in Missouri redrew their Congressional map, cracking Kansas City to eliminate one of two Democratic held seats. I wrote about that whole process here. In that new map, however, the heavily Black 1st Congressional district was not touched, as Republicans feared a VRA challenge.
I have largely stuck to discussing Black districts in the south because these are some of the most prominent and straight forward examples of VRA protections. However, trust me when I say these protections stretch across multiple racial groups and all the way up and down ballot. Whether its a Black-majority Congressional district in Tennessee or an Asian-majority city council seat in California, the VRA serves as a potential shield against partisan games in the annual remap process.
Or at least it did provide a shield before the Callais decision came in.
Louisiana and the Callais Case
The Callais decision stems from the redistricting drama that took place in Louisiana over the last few years. I actually wrote a very detailed breakdown of Louisiana’s Congressional redistricting in this October article. I highly recommend giving that article a read for far more details and history on Louisiana redistricting. However I will cover the key factors here.
The Congressional debate in Louisiana centered around whether the state was obligated to have one or two Black Congressional districts. Despite being around 1/3 Black, Louisiana Republicans drew a Congressional map that had just one majority-Black seat. The 2nd Congressional district in question packed Black voters from Orleans and up to East Baton Rouge. With Louisiana well known for racially polarized voting, with white voters often voting 80% for the Republican party, this created a 5-1 partisan breakdown of the map.
The state of Louisiana was sued under the VRA to force the drawing of a second majority-Black Congressional district. The plaintiffs suing offered maps showing a compact plan was entirely feasible. I even drafted my own proposal, which aimed to limit parish splits as much as possible.
Louisiana Republicans lost their battle in the federal court, with judges agreeing that Louisiana’s Congressional map backed Black voters in the 2nd Congressional district in order dilute their influence in other seats. Lawmakers were given the right to draw their own proposal to remedy the situation, otherwise a court would do it for them.
Lawmakers knew that in the redraw, they would lose one of their Republican members, as any new majority-Black seat would lean Democratic. Lawmakers did not want to draw a compact plan like my proposal, however, as it would endanger Congresswoman Julie Letlow; who was well liked. Republicans instead aimed to screw over Republican Garret Graves. As a result, lawmakers decided to meet the court mandate by saving Letlow’s seat and instead created a district Black-majority sat that tore apart the old 6th and create a meandering seat that stretched from East Baton Rouge and all the way to Shreveport.
This ugly ass looking district met the racial mandate of the court, being 54% Black. However, it followed no true redistricting principles other than to collect Black voters from one end of the state to another. That said, as my October article lays out, this mapping decision was still driven by which Republican incumbents to protect. Such an ugly 6th was not necessary.
With the map approved, a lawsuit eventually followed challenging the plan. A group of voters sued, arguing the plan was a racially predominant map that hence violated the 14th amendment; basically that the plan discriminated against non-Black voters. This became the Callais case.
The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court in 2025, with oral arguments being held in March of that year. The case could have related just to the issue of the map itself and whether the 6th was racially predominant. Like many court cases from the 1990s and after, the court could have struck down the map but simply ordered a new configuration. The court also could have ruled that having at least one majority-Black seat met the VRA criteria, and that a 2nd majority-Black seat was not a right under the law.
The court appeared to expand the scope of the case when, instead of issuing a ruling, they called for re-arguments to be held in October of 2025. The court wanted defendants and plaintiffs to submit briefs on if the maps violated the 14th and 15th amendments. This move told legal experts that the court was considering weakening Section 2 of the VRA, potentially arguing that the VRA racial mandates were in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. The long-held argument from conservatives has been VRA cases like this are discriminatory against white citizens by creating special protections and mandates for minority voters. I wholesale REJECT this claim but I will leave that for a future article.
Considering the far-right bent of the current Supreme Court, there was a real fear that the Voting Rights Act would be entirely struck down, or at the very least fundamentally weakened.
This worry proved sadly true.
The Callais Decision
On April 29, the Supreme Court released its ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito. The ruling came down 6-3 on pure ideological lines. While the ruling did not strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it weakened it in fundamental ways, arguably to a point few redistricting lawsuits would ever succeed.
I am only going to cover some key points here, as I am not a legal expert and this article is long enough. However, I recommend analysis here, here, and here for much more detail on the ruling.
How the VRA is Gutted
First thing to get out of the way, the court did NOT strike down the consideration or use of race in redistricting maps. In the opinion, Alito said that racial preferences/discrimination (again many white conservatives view the VRA as discrimination against whites in redistricting) are rarely allowed, but notably not banned. The court sites the history of discrimination as a need for legal remedy. The court, however, makes it clear they are going to restructure how the VRA is “properly construed.” Of course their definition of “properly” differs radically from my own.
The ruling essentially states that Section 2 is sometimes warranted. However, the ruling sets up a major obstacle for proving that map-makers tried to dilute the influence of a racial minority.
The ruling states that discrimination based on race must be the intention OUTSIDE of partisan considerations. In other words, if a map cracks Black voters to draw more Republican districts, that is not the same thing as racial discrimination under the court’s view. The court in essence prioritizing partisan considerations OVER racial representation in a legislative body.
Scotusblog summed this up best when it came to the Louisiana case.
Among other things, Alito said, the Black voters “did not provide an illustrative map that” protected the state’s Republican incumbents. Alito acknowledged that the Black voters had “offered evidence that black and white voters consistently supported different candidates, but their analysis did not control for partisan preference.”
In past cases, when plaintiffs suing for a new map have to submit supporting documents, they have to factor in some key items. The major issues to prove are that a majority-minority seat can be drawn compactly, and that such a seat is needed due to racially-polarized voting. Alito, now, is adding in that plaintiffs must prove a majority-minority seat doesn't conflict with the partisan aims for state lawmakers.
The ruling, in essence, says a state’s partisan redistricting goals matters more than racial representation.
Restructuring Gingles
As the ruling goes on, Alito affirms that the three considerations for drawing a minority seat, as laid out in Thornburg v Gingles, are not overturned. A reminder of those conditions were….
The racial/language minority is large enough and compact enough to make up a majority of a single member district
The minority group is politically cohesive (aka they can/do vote as a block)
The majority racial block often votes as a unit to deny the minority candidate of choice victory in elections.
Alito did not overturn these, but added in several new considerations, citing “40 years of changes”. These key changes Alito considers as the following. Btw, I will give each reason Alito lays out, and then give my opinion below the number.
Social change in the south had reduced discrimination based on race
My Answer: While Jim Crow is hardly as powerful as it was in the 1960s, there is no shortage of racial discrimination cases that emerge out of the south.
The South is now in a two-party system, where partisan vote is heavily correlated with race.
Answer: Here Alito is saying that racially polarized voting is more a factor of partisanship than it is race. Hence the race-block voting the Gingles case references is less than it was in the past. However, as I documented in a local non-partisan election from Louisiana here, there is still AMPLE racial block voting, regardless of Party ID.
The court said it would not take up partisan gerrymandering claims in Rucho v Common Cause. With that ruling, Alito believes plaintiffs are bringing VRA cases that actually are just about partisan gerrymandering, not racial.
Answer: In legal language, Alito is accusing people who bring VRA suits of simply trying to add Democratic districts in the deep south. This sentiment is without ANY evidence and ignores that VRA suits have been going on before and after the Rucho decision. Likewise VRA suits come all the time for local non-partisan races. This is just a political accusation that has no place in a court opinion like this.
New Computer technology allows plaintiffs filing lawsuits to easier prove they can draw maps that produces fair racial maps while also adhering to the state aims.
Answer: Here the state aims can include incumbent protection and partisan desires. In reality, this means the state has an easy excuse for why racial-minority seats are eliminated.
All of these legal back and forth and this is the fundamental summary of the ruling….
The Callais decision makes it nearly impossibly for minority communities to sue under the Voting Rights Act. Under the decision, partisan gerrymandering and incumbent protection are considered valid reasons for why a minority community is either packed or cracked.
The new frameworks in practice strike down the “results test” originally formed in the 1982 amendments to the act. It shifts the burden back to plaintiffs to prove racist intent in map making, but adds a bunch of new excuses map makers can give for why they carved up or packed minority voters.
There is already scandal in the ruling, as data that Alito sites is being openly questioned. One of the justifications for the ruling was that Black voter participation has come to parity with white turnout in much of the country, including the south. However, data analysists have pointed out this fact is NOT true, and relies on flawed metrics for defining “turnout.” So in essence, Alito struck out the results test and made it harder to sue, partly because of claims over data that is inaccurate.
The Impact of the Ruling
While the ruling “upheld” the VRA, it is made borderline useless. As Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, stated…..
“This is a full gut. This is burn the house down and pretend the house still exists because you can point to where the foundation used to be,”
Justice Kagan, a liberal who wrote the dissent in the case, agreed, calling the ruling one that turns the VRA into a “dead letter.”
In a review of the decision by the Harvard Kennedy School, experts agree this decision fundamentally weakens the ability of racial minorities to sue for relief under the voting rights act. The issue at heart is tying up the Gingles considerations with partisan considerations.
On the first condition, Justice Alito’s opinion makes clear that plaintiffs now must also show that a state redistricted based on race and not party. In a way, this is the same test, but with “partisan objectives” included in “traditional redistricting criteria.”
Second, Justice Alito says that for the second and third conditions, which are often analyzed together, plaintiffs must somehow “control for party affiliation” and show that racial bloc voting “cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.” Given the high correlation between party and race, especially in the American South, this will likely be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do.
So, while formally the Section 2 Gingles test remains in place, it has been narrowed to a degree that makes it incredibly difficult to use.
Further in the analysis, experts lay out a very bleak picture for the future of lawsuits under the voting rights act.
This paints a bleak picture for the future of Black representation in elected offices, particularly in the South. Across the region, race is a very strong predictor of how people vote: Southern whites tend to be among the most conservative and Republican-leaning in the country, while Southern Blacks are among the most reliably Democratic.
As a result, Republican state legislators throughout the South will have a strong incentive to eliminate Congressional districts that currently elect Black representatives. After this ruling, they can simply justify those changes on partisan grounds, and for this Supreme Court, that will be enough. In fact, Justice Alito’s majority opinion effectively invites states to frame their decisions as driven by partisanship whenever possible, even in places where race almost perfectly predicts vote choice and party identification is deeply polarized along racial lines.
The ruling fundamentally guts protections for minority communities. This sentiment is not just alarmist talk either, as the events that have transpired just in the past few weeks have shown.
The Rush to Crack Black Voters
The affect of the ruling is already been felt across the deep south. With lawmakers now free to make partisan goals their main consideration in redistricting, the shield for Black-majority districts was gone.
Within days of the ruling, Tennessee lawmakers worked to revamp their Congressional map. The lone Democratic-held seat, the majority-Black 9th located in Memphis, was divided up three different ways.
The three districts in question, the 9th, 5th, and 8th, all divvy up the city of Memphis. The lines cut right through the black community of the city.
The division of Memphis rendered no district majority-Black. Thanks to the racially polarized voting that takes place in the south, this meant all 9 majority-white districts were now firmly Republican seats.
The chaotic remap of Tennessee, which I would like to dedicate a separate article too, came as Republican lawmakers fell back on the excuse that this was purely for partisan reasoning. These lawmakers went out of their way to avoid bringing up race, almost to a comical degree. At one point, a State Senator insisted he had no idea what the racial makeup of the city of Memphis was.
The Republicans hid behind their proposal simply being “race blind” - and rather just a partisan gerrymander. All of this has been endorsed by the courts now. The ability to crack Memphis, easily one of the most logical and compact majority-Black seats in the south, really does mean the Voting Rights Act is a “dead letter.” The shield is now sadly off.
Looking Ahead
Things are not stopping there, as South Carolina is currently beginning a special session to try and eliminate its lone majority-Black Congressional district as well. Georgia wants to remap as well, and Alabama has already remapped to eliminate one of its two majority-Black seats. Mississippi has likewise planned to redistrict as well.
This ruling will spark a massive assault on minority communities across the country. Right now the south is doing exactly what the ghosts of Jim Crow and the Confederacy want. I sadly cannot say I am surprised. I will be working on breakdowns of these map changes in individual articles. Sadly I fear I will have no shortage of items to right about.
The fight for equality is not over!
Great analysis, thanks!
One thing that always intrigues me was the ultimately perverse effect of the effective Moores/NAACP voter registration campaign in Florida: Enough Black folks registered to protect the state from the pre-clearance requirement of the VRA except for a couple of counties.
Jason Garcia pointed me to your site.