Supreme Court Curbs Use of Race in Drawing Voting Districts (3)

The US Supreme Court sharply limited the use of the Voting Rights Act to create predominantly Black or Hispanic election districts in a major ruling that buttresses Republican efforts to keep control of the House in this year’s midterms and beyond.

Voting 6-3 along ideological lines, the justices on Wednesday rejected a Louisiana congressional map that was drawn with a second majority-Black district after a lower court found an earlier set of lines to be discriminatory. Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said the current map was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

Samuel Alito Jr.

Photographer: Erin Schaff/The New York Times/Bloomberg

The ruling undercuts what had been the most significant remaining part of the Voting Rights Act, a law passed in 1965 to address rampant discrimination against Black voters. Although the court didn’t strike down the law or explicitly overrule any precedents, the majority set up a demanding new test for those seeking to create heavily minority districts.

Dissenting Justice Elena Kagan said the ruling’s consequences “are likely to be far-reaching and grave.” She said the decision rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that outlaws racially discriminatory election rules, “all but a dead letter.”

The ruling is likely to help Republicans, given that disputed districts like the one in Louisiana tend to vote Democratic. Progressive groups have said that as many as 19 congressional districts with primarily Black or Hispanic populations were at risk, along with a much larger number of state and local districts. A similar challenge to a majority-Black district in Alabama is already pending at the Supreme Court, and the justices are likely to act in that case in the coming days.

The ruling comes weeks before Louisiana’s scheduled May 16 primary, and lawmakers in that state could now try to quickly craft a new map. Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry said that “my lawyers are currently analyzing the opinion.” The state right now has four Republican representatives and two Democrats.

The proposed Congressional redistricting plan for the state of Florida displayed during a special legislative session at the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee on April 28.

Photographer: Malcolm Jackson/Bloomberg

Beyond Louisiana, it’s not clear what effect the ruling will have this year. It won’t necessarily invalidate heavily minority districts elsewhere, though it could spur some states to try to quickly redraw their maps. Florida is currently holding a special session to consider a redistricting that could add multiple seats to the Republican column.

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said on social media Wednesday that the ruling “implicates a district in FL — the legal infirmities of which have been corrected in the newly-drawn (and soon to be enacted) map.”

John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said the full impact of the decision probably won’t be felt until 2028, given that most states either have already held primary elections or have passed the candidate filing deadlines.

“I think it’s too late” to make changes, he said. “Look, they’ve proven to be outrageous in what they believe to be some flexible version of the Constitution. But yeah, I think at this point it’s too late.”

Texas last year became the first state to pursue an unusual mid-decade redistricting, aiming to create more Republican seats at the behest of the White House. The move kicked off a bipartisan parade of states drawing new lines for partisan reasons.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has now taken major planks out of the Voting Rights Act three times. In 2013, the court nullified a different section that had required many states and cities to get federal preclearance before changing election maps or rules. In 2021, the court established a tough new test for claims that voting rules are discriminatory — a standard so demanding that no lawsuit has met it since.

Long Fight

The latest ruling grew out of a years-long fight over the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, a state with six House seats and a 33% Black population.

A three-judge panel said the Voting Rights Act required a second majority-Black seat. The Republican-controlled legislature then drew a new 6th District, which ran a jagged 250-mile course, scooping in heavily Black areas from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. The map preserved the districts of key Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, while opening the way for a Democrat to capture the 6th District in the 2024 election.

A separate group of voters, describing themselves as “non-African Americans,” then sued to claim that the new map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by relying too heavily on race. A different judicial panel declared the new map unconstitutional, and the voters appealed to the Supreme Court.

The high court was scheduled to rule in the term that ended last June but instead took the unusual step of hearing a second argument to consider the broader constitutional issues.

Demonstrators outside the US Supreme Court in Washington in October 2025.

Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg

The Trump administration, Louisiana and the suing voters urged the court to cut back the Voting Rights Act, contending that race-based districts violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Louisiana originally defended the map but switched sides after the court expanded the scope of the case.

Voters represented by the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund said the Voting Rights Act is targeted enough to avoid any constitutional problems.

Tougher Test

The Supreme Court in 1986 set up a multipart test for determining whether lines illegally dilute minority voting strength. The ruling applied a 1982 amendment Congress enacted to allow electoral maps to be challenged based on their practical effects, without a showing of intentional discrimination.

Alito said in Wednesday’s ruling that the court would “update” that test but not abandon it. Among other requirements, he said those seeking to invoke the Voting Rights Act to create a new heavily minority district would have to create an “illustrative” map showing the district could be created without sacrificing the state’s political goals, including protection of incumbents.

The alternative map must be one that “achieves all the state’s objectives — including partisan advantage and any of the state’s other political goals — at least as well as the state’s map,” Alito wrote.

Kagan said the majority was eviscerating the court’s precedents. “Under the court’s new view of Section 2, state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” she wrote. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Kagan in dissent.

Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Alito’s majority opinion. Thomas and Gorsuch said they would have gone even further and barred any use of Section 2 in redistricting cases.

The groups that advocated for the second majority-Black Louisiana district blasted the ruling.

“This decision is a profound betrayal of the legacy of the civil rights movement,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. “By gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the court has weakened the primary legal tool that voters of color rely on to challenge discriminatory maps and election systems.”

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, called the ruling “a seismic decision reaffirming equal protection under our nation’s laws.”

The Supreme Court unexpectedly allowed the continued use of race in drawing district lines in a 2023 Alabama case, with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the court’s liberals in the majority.

Alito, who dissented in the 2023 case, said Wednesday that it didn’t involve the constitutional questions the court addressed in the Louisiana decision. Kagan said the court was effectively overturning the 2023 ruling.

The cases are Louisiana v. Callais, 24-109, and Robinson v. Callais, 24-110.

(Updates with additional reaction starting in sixth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Daniel Cancel and Gregory Korte.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

Steve Stroth

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