Justices Signal to States Voter Map Changes Timely for Midterms

The Supreme Court runs the risk of “turbocharging” mid-decade redistricting with its decision allowing Texas to move forward with a redrawn 2026 congressional map a lower court had blocked as a racial gerrymander, critics say.

The unsigned ruling on Thursday, issued via the justices’ emergency docket, found a three-judge panel had improperly inserted itself into the state’s political process on the “eve of an election,” suggesting the conservative justices will not allow any court intervention thwarting newly drawn maps before next year.

“The case seems to send a strong signal that the court is going to be very skeptical of any federal courts interfering with redistricting decisions by states for the 2026 election,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles. “We might call it ‘Purcell creep'; because the ‘eve’ of the election seems to be getting mighty long.”

Justice Elena Kagan sharply criticized the court’s conservative majority in a 16-page dissent, saying they had warped the principle established in the 2006 case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, that cautions lower courts against changing rules prior to an election to avoid voter confusion.

“Except to the extent all of us live in election season all the time, the 2026 congressional election is not well underway,” wrote Kagan, who was joined by the two other liberal justices.

The court in Purcell blocked an Arizona voter ID law from going into effect a little more than a month before that year’s midterm election.

The court didn’t cite Purcell in its per curiam opinion on Thursday, but rather another case, Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, involving an even smaller window of time. There, the court stayed a district court’s order allowing a change in how Wisconsin counted absentee ballots that would have gone into effect five days before the 2020 presidential primary.

The preliminary Texas order is the latest instance of the court reinstating a map previously ruled to be a racial gerrymander on account that it was too close to an election for a court to weigh in.

“It seems in its recent decisions the court has taken a maximalist vision of what eve of an election means,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

“It’s gone from eve of an election to eve of an election cycle,” he said, citing signature-gathering deadlines and primary dates of an election process. The candidate-filing deadline in Texas is on Dec. 8.

US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, said in his preliminary injunction that the Purcell analysis didn’t apply in this case and that any disruption was “attributable to the legislature, not the court.”

But “the majority on the court signaled that’s not going to fly,” said Jason Torchinsky, an election law attorney at Holtzman Vogel who filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of Texas’ Republican senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

The message the justices are sending is “we’re not going to disrupt election processes underway and election challenges need to be heard farther away from elections than a lot of these advocates in front of the court are asking for,” said Torchinsky.

Thursday’s ruling sends the message that “it’s timing that’s more important than evidence” when it comes to Supreme Court review of redistricting cases, said Adriel Cepeda Derieux, deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. The ACLU had filed an amicus brief before the district court warning Texas’ redrawn map would harm voters of color.

“If states know they can redraw a map mid-cycle and weaponize Purcell to avoid judicial review, then that will only embolden this redistricting arms race,” Cepeda Derieux said.

Several other states are considering or have already begun the process of redrawing their congressional maps for 2026—either in response to pressure from President Donald Trump, who wants to ensure Republicans retain control of the US House, or in response to it.

California voters approved Proposition 50 last month authorizing the state legislature to draw up new congressional maps in direct response to Texas’ efforts. Indiana’s state legislature was scheduled to vote Friday on redrawing its own maps with an eye toward netting two more Republican seats, although the plan faced opposition in the GOP-controlled state senate.

If the case returns to the court’s merits docket, the justices could ultimately decide Texas’ maps do, as the district court found, violate the Constitution. The court in 2023 ruled a map Alabama created at the start of the decade was an illegal racial gerrymander, after a year earlier allowing that same map to be used in the 2022 elections.

The courts’ liberals warned repeating history would mean allowing states to hold elections using even blatantly unconstitutional maps as long as they were passed on a similar schedule.

“That cannot be the law—except of course that today it is,” Kagan wrote.

The case is Greg Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, U.S., No. 25A608, stay granted on 12/4/25.