After the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a congressional map found to intentionally discriminate against Black voters, minority voters’ ability to challenge racial discrimination in redistricting is left with few practical routes—mostly state-level laws
By the time the Supreme Court moved on from Louisiana v. Callais, Alabama’s redistricting fight was already nearing the kind of ending that leaves voters feeling cornered.
This week, the high court allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that a lower court found intentionally discriminates against Black voters. The decision didn’t just settle a case; it widened the gap between what minority voters can prove in court and what they can actually stop in practice.
Legal experts and voting-rights advocates say the consequences are especially stark for Black voters in the states of the old Confederacy—places where voting is heavily polarized between a white. Republican-leaning majority and a Black. Democratic-leaning minority. “Today the bulk of Black people live in the states of the old Confederacy. And that is exactly where you’re seeing the worst types of retrenchment. ” Wilfred Codrington III. a professor of constitutional law at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law. said.
The core issue is enforcement power. After Callais, minority voters are left with limited alternatives for combatting racial discrimination in redistricting. Many legal experts argue that nationwide provisions under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are now practically impossible to enforce. In the gap created by that shift. advocates are left improvising—fighting on state law. on map strategies. and on the hope that Washington can change before the next round of lines.
State-level voting rights laws are the clearest short-term tool. Supporters say these state statutes can offer anti-discrimination protections that go beyond what the federal law is now able to deliver. In the month since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, advocates have pushed harder for states to enact such measures.
Democratic lawmakers have advanced bills in states including Michigan and New Jersey. The Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act is set to be formally introduced Friday. But there’s a blunt political reality behind those announcements: unlike the federal Voting Rights Act. state-level counterparts generally cover only state and local elections—not congressional districts. And while around a dozen states have passed similar protections. no state with a unified Republican or divided government has done so. That leaves Deep South efforts especially vulnerable to failure before they can ever become law.
Even if states manage to pass protections, court watchers worry that the Supreme Court’s current posture could come for those laws too. Codrington said, “I’m nervous that the Supreme Court may sort of have those in its crosshairs as well.”
Litigation is already testing that boundary. Just over a week after the conservative supermajority issued its Callais decision. the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit over Illinois’ voting rights act. The filing argues that the Illinois law is unconstitutional because it requires an improper use of race in state legislative redistricting.
The fight over who gets to draw lines is now colliding with a fight over whether race can be considered at all. A signal that Washington is watching these state-law battles came from the Justice Department’s civil-rights leadership. In an April social media post on X. Jesus Osete. principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. appeared to signal that the Trump administration is paying attention to fallout from the Supreme Court ruling.
The exchange was direct. Osete responded to Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s post about signing state voting rights act protections into law the day before the Supreme Court’s decision. Moore wrote. “Even if Washington won’t protect your vote. I will.” Osete replied. “Who’s gonna tell him?” The Justice Department’s public affairs office did not respond to NPR’s request for comment about Osete’s post.
Some advocates are also pushing a different kind of strategy—one that doesn’t rely on challenging racial discrimination in court the same way. In states where Democrats control the mapmaking process. observers say there may be room to use partisan tactics to protect minority opportunity districts rather than shrinking them.
With the ongoing congressional gerrymandering fight expected to continue for the 2028 election. redistricting observers have raised the possibility that Democratic-controlled states could break up districts where minority voters have a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidate. The theory behind that concern is straightforward: Democratic map drawers could spread minority voters who tend to support Democrats into other districts and try to gain additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
But Nick Stephanopoulos, an election law professor at Harvard Law School, argues that this tradeoff is not inevitable. “This tradeoff should not be present in big blue states like Illinois, New York, California and so on,” Stephanopoulos said. He wrote an upcoming Columbia Law Review article on the topic.
Stephanopoulos says maps can be designed to shift outcomes without erasing minority representation. “It should generally be possible to design maps that are more skewed in a Democratic direction. but that at least maintain current levels of minority representation. ” he said. For mapmakers. he describes the key as distributing Democratic voters in ways that make more districts reasonably safe. but not overly safe. for Democratic candidates.
The example he points to is California’s new congressional map. Democrats drew it to flip five Republican-held seats without eliminating any minority-opportunity districts. The Trump administration argued that the map is “tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. ” but the Supreme Court ultimately allowed California to use it.
Still, that approach doesn’t solve the specific vacuum created in Republican-controlled Southern states. “Only federal action would respond to the vacuum that’s left in the South,” Stephanopoulos said.
Federal action, though, is where time runs out fastest. Any attempt to strengthen the Voting Rights Act is expected to take years. if not longer. and bipartisan support has dissipated in recent decades. The path to a shored-up federal law would likely require Democrats to regain control of both Congress and the White House.
Democratic leadership is already framing the issue as a long fight. In a statement released hours after the Supreme Court issued its Callais ruling. Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said. “We will not rest until the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the law of the land and we end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all.”.
But Stephanopoulos also sees the conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court as the ultimate obstacle for a strengthened federal Voting Rights Act. He suggested that indirect approaches—tackling partisan gerrymandering—might be more achievable right now.
During the Biden administration, the then-Democratic-controlled Congress was unable to pass national bans on partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting. Those bans were part of voting-rights bills that couldn’t surpass Republican opposition in a closely divided Senate.
If Democrats regain the House this November, Jeffries said the effort wouldn’t stop at legislative fixes. In a MS NOW interview last month, he said passing voting rights protections and exploring “massive judicial reform, state by state and at the federal level” are among the Democrats’ priorities.
Some election reformers want something even more fundamental: replacing the current single-member, winner-take-all districts for the U.S. House with a proportional representation system. They argue such a change could help ensure fairer representation of people of color and other minority voters. But supporters acknowledge that the shift would require changing federal law that currently bans proportional representation.
In the near term, Codrington keeps pushing for imperfect movement rather than waiting for a federal rewrite. He said it’s still worthwhile for states and local communities to pursue attempts at “some measure of fairness” in elections—whether through new state laws or redistricting strategies.
“States are in this unique position to do some things,” Codrington said. “But we need a federal government to be involved and invested in this problem if we’re going to have any sort of wide promotion of democracy across the United States.”
The Supreme Court’s decision has left minority voters staring at a narrower map of legal options—one that depends more on state legislatures. courts. and carefully drawn lines than on the federal protections that were meant to stand as a backstop across the country. For many, the urgency isn’t theoretical. It’s measured in the next redistricting cycle. the next lawsuit. and whether “protect our vote” can still be enforced when the rules of the game keep changing.
Supreme Court Alabama congressional map Louisiana v. Callais Voting Rights Act Section 2 minority voting rights racial discrimination in redistricting John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act state voting rights laws Wes Moore Hakeem Jeffries partisan gerrymandering proportional representation