Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling Sparks Redistricting Battles Across the South

-Editorial 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29 decision striking down Louisiana’s congressional map containing two majority-Black districts has sparked renewed debate over voting rights and representation across the South.

The ruling weakened protections under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a federal law designed to prevent voting practices that dilute minority representation. Voting rights advocates said the decision could have broad implications for Black voters and other minority communities in future redistricting efforts.

Within hours of the ruling, lawmakers in several Southern states began discussing emergency redistricting sessions, prompting concern among civil rights organizations that new district maps could reduce minority voting influence.

Mitchell Brown said recent legal developments have created significant obstacles for attorneys and advocacy organizations seeking to challenge electoral maps they believe dilute the voting power of communities of color.

Brown serves with the Southern Leadership for Voter Engagement Network, known as SOLVE, a project of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, based in Durham.

Speaking during the discussion, Brown said the recent “Calais” decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made it more difficult to bring successful claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the federal law intended to protect minority voters from discriminatory election practices and district maps.

“Just to set the scene for today, the Calais decision came down a couple of weeks ago and really makes it hard for attorneys like myself and advocates on the democracy front,” Brown said. “It makes it harder to challenge maps and makes it harder for voters of color to let their voices be heard in our communities.”

Brown said the current legal and political climate surrounding voting rights is not new, describing it as part of a historical cycle that has followed periods of expanded voter participation and increased political representation for minority communities.

“I want to start by saying this is not new, though,” Brown said. “This has been the party line, and pun intended, for a very long time. When there are periods of increased voter participation and increased opportunity for voters of color, there’s this white retrenchment that seeks to take it away.”

Brown argued that while decades were spent building voting rights protections through federal legislation and court rulings, recent legal decisions are gradually weakening those safeguards.

“It took us decades to get voting rights and other civil rights, and now it’s taking decades to try to dismantle them,” Brown said.

According to Brown, one of the most significant consequences of the ruling is that plaintiffs challenging district maps may now have to prove intentional discrimination rather than demonstrating discriminatory effects.

“What the Calais case does is it essentially makes it very hard to prove a Section 2 case because now we have to prove intentional discrimination,” Brown said.

He explained that proving intentional discrimination in court can be difficult because lawmakers rarely make explicit statements acknowledging discriminatory motives.

“You have to have smoking gun evidence, essentially, of a legislator or legislative body saying, ‘I drew this map to disenfranchise and to discriminate against Black, brown and AAPI voters,’” Brown said. “These legislators and legislative bodies are very cunning people, and they’re not going to say the quiet part out loud.”

Brown noted that Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 specifically to remove the requirement that plaintiffs prove intentional discrimination in Section 2 cases. Instead, courts could evaluate whether district maps resulted in diluted minority voting power regardless of intent.

“Now, 44 years later, this court has reversed track and basically taken away the power of Congress to enforce the 15th Amendment,” Brown said.

Brown said the ruling has already triggered rapid responses from state governments across the South, where lawmakers are moving to redraw congressional and legislative districts.

“States are rushing to pass new maps,” Brown said. “They are rushing to change Voting Rights Act districts that were drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act.”

He added that some states are also seeking to redraw districts for partisan purposes even when the districts were not created under federal voting protections.

Brown said those efforts are occurring at a time when voting rights advocates have fewer legal tools available to challenge redistricting plans.

“In the past, when we had the full Section 2, when we had Section 5, when we had robust racial gerrymandering laws, we had a wide array of tools to use to fight back against redistricting,” Brown said. “Now we don’t have those anymore.”

Brown pointed to Alabama as a key example of the growing conflict between partisan politics and racial representation in redistricting cases.

He referenced the case Allen v. Milligan, later renamed Merrill v. Milligan, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that Alabama’s congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to create a second minority opportunity district.

According to Brown, Alabama lawmakers resisted implementing the ruling, prompting further legal action. A three-judge federal panel later found the state had intentionally discriminated against Black voters by refusing to create an additional district where Black voters would have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidate.

Brown said the Supreme Court later allowed Alabama to redraw its maps again despite the lower court’s findings.

“Alabama gets a clean slate, essentially, even though they discriminated and were found to have discriminated against Black voters,” Brown said.

He warned that the legal and political battles currently unfolding at the congressional and state levels could eventually influence local elections as well.

“We’re concerned that what’s happening at the congressional level and what’s happening at the state level is going to find its way to local elections,” Brown said.

Brown said advocacy organizations are urging residents to closely monitor changes proposed by local governments, including efforts to convert nonpartisan elections into partisan races.

“There could be changes in changing nonpartisan races to partisan races, which would allow there to be some movement in districts and some gamesmanship in districts,” Brown said.

In response, Brown said advocates are encouraging communities to become more involved in local government discussions and to consider alternative election systems, including proportional representation models, as a possible way to counter partisan gerrymandering.

“We’re trying to make sure that racial justice still takes the day, despite there being partisanship,” Brown said. “Partisanship should never be the answer, especially when it impacts voters of color.”