Little of Voting Rights Act Is Left After Supreme Court Ruling

The US Supreme Court for the third time in 13 years under Chief Justice John Roberts narrowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, leaving little remaining of the civil rights movement’s crowning achievement, according to election law advocates, legal scholars and the court’s liberal bloc.

The court’s conservative majority, in a 6–3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, adopted a stricter standard for claims under the law’s Section 2, the provision used for decades to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory.

“It kind of completes the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act,” said Omar Noureldin, vice president of policy and litigation at the watchdog group Common Cause. “Without ruling it unconstitutional wholesale, the majority here has kind of done that by a thousand cuts.”

All three liberal justices dissented from the majority’s holding, with Justice Elena Kagan writing it left Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

The Roberts court has repeatedly limited provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which was passed with the explicit aim of ending racial discrimination in voting.

In 2013, Roberts wrote for the majority in Shelby County v. Holder as the court effectively ended a requirement found in Section 5 of the act that states with a history of voter suppression get preclearance from the Justice Department before enacting new voting regulations.

Eight years later, the majority in Brnovich v. DNC restricted Section 2 challenges to allegedly discriminatory voting laws.

The Voting Rights Act, which was reauthorized on a largely bipartisan basis in 2006, remains law, and it continues to apply to other procedures that deny voting on account of race, said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. That includes the closing of polling places or photo ID laws.

A lesser-known provision still requires the translation of ballots into foreign languages. And another section gives courts the power to require a preclearance regime for states or locales found to intentionally discriminate against voters.

Even so, Crum said, “when people said the Voting Rights Act, they typically meant Section 5 and Section 2.”

“This is a big one-two punch between Shelby County and Callais,” he said, describing the statute as “moribund.”

Partisan Defenses

Wednesday’s ruling also follows the conservative-led court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause that permitted redistricting based on partisan motivations.

That combination could transform the electoral map, said Jon Greenbaum, the former chief counsel to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law who now runs Justice Legal Strategies.

“It gives license for legislators in places where people vote on racial and partisan lines to eliminate districts where voters of color have been able to elect their candidates of choice,” he said.

States will be able to dismantle districts where racial minorities represent a majority of voters for partisan reasons, said Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

“The new maps will then be largely immune from Section 2 (or racial gerrymandering) claims thanks to Callais,” he said in an email.

Alito Opinion

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the focus on that provision must be on intentional race discrimination, while voicing concern about the potential for litigants to exploit race-based claims for “partisan purposes.”

“What this does is restore the concept of a colorblind Constitution we’re supposed to have,” said Jason Torchinsky, an election law attorney at Holtzman Vogel, contesting the notion that the ruling could fundamentally alter voter maps in a way that hurts minority representation.

On the flip side, the ruling will provoke lawsuits seeking to eliminate maps that were drawn with race as a factor, Torchinsky added. “If you look around the country, you’ll find a bunch of those,” he said.

John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on election issues, said he largely agrees with Kagan’s assessment. But Section 2 claims could live on in some intra-party situations, he said, such as an attempt to disenfranchise minority voters in a primary by moving from single-member to at-large districts.

“Those cases I think still could be brought,” Fortier said, adding that such claims were common in the initial period after the VRA was ratified.

Crum also noted that while the court blessed partisan gerrymandering as a defense in a case over alleged racial discrimination, some states have laws barring partisan-based redistricting.

“Those states are not going to be able to raise this defense that the court just gave them in Callais,” he said. “It’s going to be state specific for the impacts on this.”

The cases are: Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, U.S., 24-109 and 24-110, 4/29/26.