This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
By Nathaniel Rakich and Carrie Levine
Votebeat
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a landmark decision significantly weakening the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Era law designed to limit racial discrimination in voting. While the ruling’s long-term impacts could be profound, it probably won’t change much for the 2026 midterms.
The immediate impact of the opinion in Louisiana v. Callais is to throw out Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But the ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, will also make it harder to use the Voting Rights Act to get political maps thrown out for being racially discriminatory going forward.
The decision broke down 6-3 along ideological lines, with the court’s Republican-appointed justices in favor and Democratic-appointed justices against.
While the court did not outright strike down the act, as many voting-rights advocates had feared, it reinterpreted it to apply only in significantly narrowed circumstances. Previously, a map only had to have the effect of discriminating against minority voters, but under the new interpretation, the act outlaws only intentional discrimination in redistricting.
The part of the act at issue, Section 2, is violated “only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.
In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan argued that this heightened standard would make it nearly impossible to get maps struck down under the Voting Rights Act.
“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” she wrote. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
Redistricting experts agreed that the decision weakens one of voting-rights advocates’ best tools for forcing states to draw political maps that prioritize nonwhite representation.
“It’s a devastating decision that will make it much harder to use Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and in many cases impossible,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In a lot of ways, it sort of completes the cycle of attacks on the Voting Rights Act … There’s stuff that’s still left, but it really is quite devastating and breathtaking in its sweep.”
“If you’re an advocate for minority representation in Congress, you have to be happy that the Voting Rights Act isn’t gone,” said Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics. “But in some ways that’s a bit of cold comfort, because the test that the majority put in place is really hard to meet in most circumstances.”
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been revised and reinterpreted multiple times since its initial passage in 1965, but at its core, it says that members of a racial minority must have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. This has historically meant that, wherever possible, states must draw districts in which nonwhite voters are the dominant voting bloc, subject to a few conditions.
These conditions, known as the Gingles test after the 1986 Supreme Court decision that set them forth, include the fact that voting preferences must be polarized by race, meaning the minority group votes cohesively for one party and the majority group votes cohesively against that party. The minority group must also be large enough to constitute a majority in a relatively compact district. (Confusingly, a district didn’t have to be majority-minority to comply with Section 2 — it just had to be possible to draw it that way.)
This standard forced several states, especially in the South, to draw predominantly nonwhite districts, which tended to elect candidates of color and Democrats. The effect was felt at every level of government. For instance, the number of nonwhite U.S. representatives increased from 26 in 1983 to 90 in 2023 as the number of majority-minority House districts increased from 35 to 131.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … has been a major engine of creating districts that represent Blacks and Latinos and Native Americans and, in some settings, Asians,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has served as a special master and court-appointed expert in a long list of redistricting cases. “You cannot overstate the significance of the Voting Rights Act in creating districts in which minorities would have a real opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.”
As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court used the Voting Rights Act to compel states to draw new Black-opportunity seats in states like Alabama — and Louisiana. But the debate over Louisiana’s map was what led to Wednesday’s decision. After a court compelled the state to add a second predominantly Black congressional district, the Republican-controlled legislature responded by drawing an awkwardly shaped 6th District that zigzagged across the state (even though it was possible to draw a more compact, majority-Black seat along the Mississippi River). A group describing themselves as “non-African American” voters sued, arguing that the new 6th District violated the Constitution because it was drawn with race as the primary consideration.
The Supreme Court heard arguments about the district in spring 2025 but, in an unusual move, decided that they wanted to hear the case again — this time with arguments more broadly addressing the constitutionality of the requirement to draw minority-opportunity districts. That reargument led to Wednesday’s decision.
Louisiana v. Callais is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that has made it harder for voting-rights groups to get gerrymandered political maps struck down in court. Most notably, the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering — the process of drawing maps for partisan gain — was permissible under federal law.
Rebecca Green, a law professor at the William & Mary Law School who co-directs the Election Law Program there, said the Callais decision opens the door for mapmakers to use partisan motives as a shield against claims that they were discriminating based on race.
If racial voting patterns “can be explained by partisanship, then that’s your out. That’s the explanation,” she said.
“If you can prove that partisanship is motivating line drawing, then you don’t have a Section 2 case,” she said of Alito’s opinion. “He’s basically just giving the legislature the benefit of the doubt by saying their intent was partisan.”
Multiple experts said they were struck by the opinion’s embrace of partisan gerrymandering. Citing the Rucho decision, the Callais opinion updated the criteria for proving a Voting Rights Act violation to include the fact that any remedial maps must also achieve the map-drawer’s “specified political goals,” such as partisan gain. Li called this “nonsense.”
Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting for the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, pointed out that the court’s decision in Rucho treated partisan gerrymandering as undesirable, but something federal courts didn’t have jurisdiction to address. In Alito’s Callais opinion, though, “it’s the opposite, and it’s like some protected right that legislatures have,” Gaber said. Alito “elevated it in importance over a statute Congress actually passed, pursuant to its constitutional authority, to prohibit racial discrimination in voting.”
The implications of the decision will take time to play out, and it doesn’t necessarily mean there are no longer any guardrails in redistricting. Partisan gerrymandering is still illegal under some state constitutions, and some states have independent redistricting commissions whose goal is to draw fairer political maps.
But efforts to depoliticize the map-drawing process, which Green noted had been gaining steam in the past couple decades, have hit a major roadblock with states’ 2025-26 decisions to redraw their congressional maps for partisan gain.
However, opponents of partisan redistricting are not entirely out of options. “This decision leaves some room for Congress — not much, but some — to correct the court’s understanding, to readjust the Voting Rights Act, and that will be an imperative,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School.
Wednesday’s decision could embolden states to gerrymander even more aggressively. For instance, Republicans control the redistricting process in several Southern states, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, that have predominantly nonwhite, safely Democratic seats that were thought to be protected by the Voting Rights Act. Those states could attempt to eliminate those seats, arguing they were doing so for partisan, not racial, reasons. Some Republicans began calling for them to do so within hours of the court’s ruling.
However, that is more likely to happen for the 2028 election, not 2026. It would be, practically speaking, very difficult for most states to redraw their maps at this stage. Mississippi, for instance, has already held its primary under the old lines, and Georgia’s primary is in just a few weeks. And the deadline for candidates to file to run has already passed in most states, including South Carolina and Tennessee.
States could decide to postpone their filing deadlines or primaries, but they have very little time to do so. “In states with an August primary, you could probably make it work,” said Trende. “But I don’t think you’re going to see much [redrawing] this cycle.”
Louisiana is in the trickiest position. It is scheduled to hold its primary — for congressional districts just struck down as unconstitutional — on May 16, and mail voting has already begun. When a local reporter asked Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday whether the Louisiana Legislature would draw a new map for 2026, he said it was too early to say. If so, the state would need to reschedule the primary.
Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.
Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.
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