By: Key Jones-Ford
In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has deemed Louisiana’s newest congressional map unconstitutional, reinterpreting the language of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.
Passed initially in 1965, the VRA enabled Black citizens of the United States (U.S.) to register to vote and sought to undo the damage of Jim Crow Laws and other related policies throughout the nation.
There are 19 total sections of the act, but the section in question is Section 2.
Section 2 states that “no voting qualification of prerequisite to voting […] shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the [US] to vote on the account of race or color.” The language has been interpreted to be against race-based gerrymandering or otherwise voter suppression.
The initial maps drawn in 2022 by Louisiana’s Republican-majority state legislature approved six districts–five white-majority, and one black-majority, based on the results of the 2020 U.S. census. Black voters challenged these maps, and a federal judge ruled that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, according to The Louisiana Illuminator. A new map was drawn that included two majority-black districts to better reflect one-third of the state’s population – Black voters.
Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin sought to take the case to SCOTUS; however, at the time, SCOTUS was hearing a similar redistricting case in Alabama, Allen v. Milligan. SCOTUS ruled on the case in June 2023, determining that Alabama had violated Section 2. As a result, lower courts ruled that the new map for Louisiana was constitutional.
However, voters sued over the new map in Feb. 2024, alleging that the state’s new maps are racially motivated.
“The State has drawn lines between neighbors and divided communities,” the lawsuit alleged, as reported by The Louisiana Illuminator. “In most cases, the lines separate African American and non-African American voters from their communities and assign them to Districts with dominating populations far away.”
The new case, Louisiana v. Callais, joins the several court challenges the VRA has faced since its passing 60 years ago. The court started to accept arguments for the case on Oct. 15, 2025.
On April 29, 2026, SCOTUS delivered its verdict. The conservative majority court ruled that the map was unconstitutional and upheld the rulings of a lower court. In SCOTUS’s assertion, the map was made with improper considerations of race, thus violating the 15th Amendment. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, stating that Section 2 was “designed to protect voters from such discrimination.”
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the middle district’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” stated Alito.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed that Section 2 should never have been interpreted “to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’” His concurring opinion was agreed upon by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor all dissented.
“[The VRA] has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed–not the members of this court,” Justice Kagan wrote in the dissenting opinion. “I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
Justice Kagan also mentioned the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which SCOTUS “nullified” the VRA’s clause to require counties with documented discriminatory practices to have their maps pre-approved by the federal government.
In the aftermath of the ruling, Alabama has requested SCOTUS to “fast-track” a hearing for its 2023 congressional map, which has also seen its own cases in the lower courts, according to AP News.
Republican members have celebrated the ruling, with Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall making a statement following the announcement of their filings.
“The Supreme Court has now made clear that you cannot assume race and politics are the same thing; you have to actually show they’re separate,” said Marshall.
Critics say that the ruling hollows the VRA and exposes minority groups to the discretion of political mapmakers.
“This is not the work of a court doing law, under any stretch of the word,” wrote David Daley and Eric J. Segall for The Guardian. “This is a court exercising raw political power, an unelected body with lifetime appointments doing grave harm to representative, multiracial democracy.”
Daley and Segall noted that, after the ruling, several other Republican-led states have already moved to redistrict their maps ahead of their primary races, including Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
Richard Hasen, an election law scholar for the University of California, has been critical of SCOTUS’s ruling, accusing Justice Alito of “favoring” Republicans as opposed to representing the American people.
“It is hard to overstate how much this weakens the Voting Rights Act, which under Gingles would have started instead with the question whether there is a group large and compact enough to form a single-member district where they would have a fair chance of electing their candidate of choice,” Hasen wrote in a blog post following the ruling. “Now, it appears that only if a random computer model would give plaintiffs that opportunity to elect their candidate of choice do they get that chance.”