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While Republican-led Southern states race to redo their congressional maps after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination, the decision’s effects may be felt most notably on the local level.
There are active legal fights over at least 17 voting maps or election systems for state and local governments that are now reckoning with the court’s ruling, an NPR analysis of federal court records has found.
In the weeks since the high court released its landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais, many lawyers in these lawsuits have been working on briefs about how they think the ruling’s reinterpretation of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 provisions in redistricting should be applied.
The focus of Section 2, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled, should now be intentional racial discrimination, a legal standard that’s notoriously difficult to prove in court.
Many legal experts see this change as a threat to representation of racial minorities and an incentive for more partisan gerrymandering at all levels of government — including state legislatures, county commissions and school districts.
So far, the high court’s decision has spelled the end for at least one fight over state legislative districts.
Last week, North Carolina state Rep. Rodney Pierce, a Democrat, agreed to drop the lawsuit he and another Black voter brought in 2023 to challenge the state’s Senate map. Pierce said the Supreme Court’s ruling has effectively made the Voting Rights Act “a meaningless law with no teeth.”
“Because of that decision, there is no longer a path open to us to protect the voting rights of Black citizens in my part of the State so we have dismissed the suit,” Pierce added in a statement. “It’s a sad day for our democracy.”
Like the congressional redistricting cases, most of the remaining state and local legal fights that may be affected by the court’s ruling come from the South, where voting is generally polarized between a white majority and a Black minority who prefer different candidates.
But there are ongoing cases from other corners of the country.
Latino voters have filed Section 2 lawsuits over Washington’s state legislative map and a Pennsylvania school district’s at-large system of electing board members. And Native American voters are in a legal fight over North Dakota’s legislative map.
All of these cases now face the higher legal bar the Supreme Court has set for challenging voting districts or systems with claims that they dilute the power of racial-minority voters, and for justifying districts where those voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
How new limits on Voting Rights Act protections complicate local redistricting
Most Section 2 cases have historically focused on municipal government, where Michael Li — a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that advocates for expanding voting access — says it’s often easiest to draw “compact, reasonably configured” districts in which racial-minority voters make up a population large enough to have a realistic chance of electing their candidates of choice.
That trend is borne out in federal court rulings.
Over the past decade, the majority of decisions that have ordered changes to redistricting maps or election systems based on Section 2 have come out of cases about local governments, mostly in Southern states, according to an analysis last year by the Brennan Center.
“What Section 2 did is it helped break down political fiefdoms that existed in the South in both partisan elections and nonpartisan elections. And the real danger now is you’re going to see the white majority in these places reassert its primacy and really design maps to lock it in,” Li adds.
The Supreme Court’s new limits on the Voting Rights Act’s longstanding protections against racial discrimination in redistricting come seven years after the conservative justices ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not reviewable by federal courts.
Li says the court has now encouraged more opponents of local majority-minority districts to argue that they have political priorities to promote in drawing districts a certain way — even for government bodies with nonpartisan seats, such as school boards.
“I think that you will increasingly see people at the local level assert that they, too, have various kinds of political interest and they want a certain political outcome, whether that is protecting existing incumbents or whether it is making sure that a school board has conservative tax policies,” Li says.
Why the Supreme Court’s ruling may bring back more at-large voting systems
Another complication from the Supreme Court’s ruling is that challengers who want to prove that a voting map violates Section 2 are now required to separate race from partisan preference when trying to show that voting in an area is racially polarized.
But partisan election data is often not available at the local level.
“That’s another wrinkle. It’s a mess,” says Gilda Daniels, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former deputy chief in the Justice Department’s voting section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has shifted its focus away from bringing lawsuits to enforce the voting rights of racial minorities. Last year, it dropped multiple cases that had begun during the Biden administration, including one against an at-large voting system in Georgia’s Houston County that a group of Black voters has since picked up.
The Trump administration has cheered the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act. In a friend-of-the-court brief for the Callais case, the DOJ argued that the law’s Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in redistricting are no longer constitutional.
Daniels sees the Justice Department’s change in priorities and the Supreme Court’s latest decision opening the door to local governments with voting districts previously drawn to get in line with Section 2 trying to “dismantle as much as they possibly can.”
“It’s very important for folk to be vigilant and to participate on the local levels, ensuring that they’re aware of what’s happening, because there are some jurisdictions that could decide, ‘You know, we’re going to move from districts to at-large,’ ” Daniels says.
That’s a possibility that would hurt local minority representation in some parts of the country, says Maureen Edobor, an assistant law professor at Washington and Lee University.
“Instead of electing representatives from geographic districts, at-large systems really allow the majority to win. So in communities with racially polarized voting, that can actually mean that the majority population will win every single seat,” Edobor explains. “At-large districts can effectively render minority votes wasted. They won’t count because you’ll never clear the threshold of a majority required to elect the candidate of your choice.”
Why more state and local redistricting fights may be coming
In Fayette County, Tenn., Elton Holmes, president of the local NAACP branch, is bracing for more setbacks.
Last year, the Justice Department pulled out of a Section 2 lawsuit over the voting map for the county’s board of commissioners, whose members are all white.
But after Holmes’ NAACP branch and a group of Black voters brought their own case to court, the county agreed to a new voting map in which three out of 10 districts are majority Black.
Less than a week after the Supreme Court released its latest ruling, the county held its first primary election under the new districts.
The county’s mayor, Rhea “Skip” Taylor, tells NPR he doesn’t see “any plans for doing any additional redistricting in the county before the 2030 census.”
But Holmes says he remains “very concerned” about how white county commissioners may react if this year’s election “doesn’t go too well” for them.
“They will come back and put those gerrymandering maps back into play,” Holmes says. “It’s just been a struggle. We finally get a little breakthrough and then something else pops up to try to push it back some more.”
Other voting rights advocates are also watching for changes to state and local voting maps in the years ahead.
According to estimates by the advocacy groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund, the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act puts close to 200 Democratic-held state legislative seats, mostly representing majority-Black districts in the South, at risk of elimination.
And the high court could upend redistricting again, depending on how the justices decide to handle a set of cases that could severely reduce enforcement of what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
