The Supreme Court yesterday in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 6-3 decision effectively nullifies Section 2 and, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”
Section 2 addresses racial vote dilution—a tactic commonly used to reduce the power of Black voters in the South after the Voting Rights Act. When states could no longer deny ballots to Black Americans, they used electoral maps and at-large election systems to give minority citizens’ votes no or minimal weight.
As with other racially discriminatory voting practices, states obscured their intentions with race-neutral language and justifications, which made it extremely difficult for voters to prove intentional discrimination. So Congress conditioned Section 2 liability not on intent but on the discriminatory effects of a districting scheme—and transformed Section 2 into an effective tool for communities to challenge racial discrimination in voting.
The 1982 amendment to Section 2 led to dramatic increases in representation. While only 18 Black people were elected to the 96th Congress (1979-1981), the 119th Congress (2025-2027) includes 65 Black representatives and five Black senators. Nationwide, the number of Black elected officials in the U.S. has surged from 1,469 in 1970 to more than 10,000 today.
In 2020, Louisiana lawmakers drew a new congressional map with just one district—out of six—where Black voters, who make up a third of the population, had a realistic chance of electing a candidate. Black voters sued under Section 2. The federal court struck down the map and ordered the state to redraw it with two Black-majority congressional districts, which it did in early 2024.
A group of white voters then challenged the redrawn map, arguing that the new Black-majority district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. As the dissent explained, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority took the opportunity to “convert Section 2 into its opposite—a statute turning on discriminatory intent, not effects.”
The Court’s decision forces a vote-dilution plaintiff to prove that a state adopted an election rule with racially discriminatory intent—and to do so without relying on history, such as the fact that Louisiana has never had a Black Congressperson elected from a non-majority-Black district. And it imposes new requirements that give states an automatic political gerrymandering defense to vote-dilution claims.
Finding that the Black voters in Louisiana had failed to meet these new requirements, the Court held that Section 2 did not require the state to add a second majority-minority district and struck down Louisiana’s map.
Requiring voters to prove intentional racial discrimination “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” Justice Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson.
She warned of “far-reaching and grave” consequences, including the likely elimination of districts “that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice.” The dissent concluded:
The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—“one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.” Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 562 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it 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. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.
The Road to the Voting Rights Act
After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial discrimination in voting, but states continued to disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation—especially in the South.
Selma, Alabama, is one example of how effectively these tactics prevented Black people from voting. In 1965, half of Selma’s population was Black, but only 2% of the county’s 15,000 Black eligible voters were registered to vote.
On March 7, 1965, Black residents planned to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery to demand their right to vote. Alabama state troopers and local police used billy clubs, whips, and tear gas to attack hundreds of nonviolent voting rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, stopping their planned march to Montgomery. The day became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Two weeks later, thousands of voting rights activists from across the country gathered in Selma and set out for Montgomery. When they reached the Capitol, 25,000 people strong, on March 25, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a powerful speech demanding voting rights.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act less than five months later, on August 6, 1965. The landmark legislation banned discriminatory qualification laws and required jurisdictions like Alabama with the worst records of discrimination to “preclear” new voting laws with the federal government. Congress reauthorized the VRA in 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House.
In the decade after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, more than a million Black people registered to vote in the Deep South. The surge in Black voters included around 200,000 in Alabama by 1975. The number of Black people elected to office in the Deep South soared from virtually none to about 1,000.
The First Blow
On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 decision to strike down the preclearance requirement because “things have changed dramatically” since 1965—voting tests were illegal, racial disparities in voter turnout and registration had diminished, and “record numbers” of minorities held elected office.
As the dissent noted, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
After Shelby County v. Holder, jurisdictions that were no longer subject to preclearance imposed identification requirements and restricted early voting, causing long lines at the polls in minority communities and barring poor and minority voters who could not obtain the requisite identification.
In a practice known as “voter purging,” many states “cleaned up” registration lists by deleting names from voter rolls in an often-flawed and racially discriminatory manner. Within five years of Shelby County, the Brennan Center found that Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia had engaged in illegal purges, while Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, and Maine had written policies that violated federal laws designed to protect against purging.
Faced with a flood of new practices and laws that make voting more difficult, voters of color cast ballots less often relative to white voters. That “turnout gap” between white and nonwhite voters reached 18 percentage points by the 2022 midterms—growing twice as quickly on average in counties that were formerly covered by preclearance requirements.
The Impact of Section 2
The VRA largely succeeded in stopping state efforts to prevent Black Americans from casting ballots at all. So states and local jurisdictions resorted to measures designed to give minorities’ votes no or minimal weight.
In 1982, Congress amended Section 2 of the VRA to allow voters to challenge electoral maps and at-large election systems that dilute the votes of communities of color. The results were dramatic, especially at the local level.
Within a decade, the Brennan Center reported, hundreds of cities, towns, and counties in the South had ended the use of discriminatory at-large election systems and “replaced them with single-member districts or alternative election systems that allowed candidates preferred by communities of color to win elections for the first time since Reconstruction.”
In a brief to the Supreme Court, the Brennan Center summarized the impact of Section 2:
Indeed, since the 1980s, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has played an indispensable role in improving representation on city councils, school boards, county commissions, and other local government bodies across the country. Its impact has been especially transformational in the South. In southern states, the widespread use of at-large elections for local government elections—a practice often dating to the post-Reconstruction era—frequently interacted with high rates of entrenched racially polarized voting, and hostility from white voters to the concerns and input of minority communities, to lock minority voters out of any realistic chance to elect candidates representing their interests. These lockouts occurred not only in partisan elections but also in the non-partisan contests that typically characterize local elections.
Section 2 also empowered voters to challenge discriminatory congressional and legislative districting plans, leading Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia to create their first majority-minority congressional districts after the 1990 census.
Until today, as the Brennan Center detailed in a friend-of-the-court brief in Callais, Section 2 vote-dilution claims have played a transformational role in “expanding electoral opportunities for voters of color at the local government level, especially in the South.”
Now, the brief warned, many jurisdictions are poised to accept the Court’s invitation “to return to the racially discriminatory systems that previously entrenched the power of white voters at the expense of minority communities.”