The Courts Are Now Drawing the Voting Rights Map

The most important election in Louisiana this spring may have been over before Election Day, and not because voters had spoken.

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, holding in Louisiana v. Callais⁵ that the Voting Rights Act did not require the state to create an additional majority-minority district and that Louisiana’s use of race in Senate Bill 8 made the map an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Days later, the Court granted an unusual request to issue its judgment immediately, even though Louisiana’s House primaries had been scheduled for May 16, overseas and military ballots had been mailed on April 1, other absentee ballots had gone out on April 26, and some voters had already returned ballots by the time the decision came down, according to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent from the Court’s May 4 order in Callais v. Louisiana⁶.

That is the story in miniature. Redistricting has always been political. What has changed is where the decisive contest happens. Increasingly, the fight for congressional power is settled before voters receive a ballot, inside a procedural maze where the calendar can matter as much as the census.

I think the post-Shelby County voting-rights system has failed in a very specific way. It has not eliminated federal voting-rights law. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still exists, and plaintiffs have sometimes won. But the system has converted minority representation from a front-end guarantee into a back-end lawsuit, and in elections that is not a technical distinction. A right vindicated after the election is a right partly lost.

Start with the hinge point: preclearance. Before 2013, states and localities covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act had to obtain federal approval before enforcing certain election changes, including redistricting plans, and the Justice Department describes Section 5 as a mechanism that “freeze[d]” covered voting changes until they were shown not to have discriminatory purpose or effect through preclearance¹. In Shelby County v. Holder², the Supreme Court did not strike down Section 5 itself, but it invalidated the Section 4 coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions had to seek preclearance, reasoning that the formula imposed current burdens that had to be justified by current needs.

The practical effect was blunt. The Justice Department says jurisdictions once identified by the old Section 4 formula “no longer need to seek preclearance” for new voting changes unless separately covered by a court order under Section 3(c) of the Act after Shelby County¹. That moved the default. A state no longer had to prove first that its map was lawful; voters often had to sue later to prove it was not.

Alabama shows why that matters. After the 2020 census, Black voters challenged Alabama’s congressional map under Section 2, the part of the Voting Rights Act that bars election practices that deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race. A three-judge federal district court held, after an extensive hearing, that Alabama’s map likely violated Section 2; the Supreme Court later described the district court’s record as including testimony from 17 witnesses, more than 1,000 pages of briefing, more than 350 exhibits, and a 227-page opinion finding the question “not close” in Allen v. Milligan³.

Then the clock beat the law. On February 7, 2022, the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s injunction, letting Alabama use the challenged map in the 2022 election while the case proceeded; Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in Merrill v. Milligan⁴ argued that the district court had carefully applied established law to an extensive record and that Black Alabamians would vote with diminished electoral power. On June 8, 2023, the Court affirmed that the plaintiffs had shown a reasonable likelihood of success on their Section 2 claim in Allen v. Milligan³. The doctrine worked, eventually. The election did not wait.

That is not a small injury. A House term lasts two years. If voters cast ballots under a map later held likely unlawful, nobody can rerun the election with the lawful districts and restore the lost representational chance. Courts can fix the next election. They cannot give voters back the last one.

Louisiana took the same structure and made it stranger. The state’s post-2020 map kept one majority-Black district out of six even though Black residents made up about one-third of the state, and civil-rights plaintiffs won a lower-court ruling that the districts likely discriminated against Black voters, according to the Associated Press⁷. The Supreme Court put that ruling on hold while it considered Alabama’s case, and both Alabama and Louisiana used maps in 2022 that federal judges had found likely discriminatory, the Associated Press⁷ reported. After Alabama, Louisiana eventually enacted SB8 with two majority-Black districts, but white voters challenged the new map as a racial gerrymander, and the Supreme Court agreed in Callais⁵.

The counterargument is serious. Race-conscious districting can go too far. The Constitution forbids states from sorting voters mainly by race unless they satisfy strict scrutiny, and Miller v. Johnson⁸ is the warning label. In that 1995 case, Georgia adopted a congressional map with three majority-Black districts after the Justice Department refused to preclear two earlier plans with two majority-Black districts; the Supreme Court held that race was the predominant factor in drawing the Eleventh District and that the state had subordinated traditional districting principles to racial goals.

Callais sharpened that warning. The Court said Louisiana’s second majority-minority district stretched about 250 miles from Shreveport to Baton Rouge while collecting Black populations from several metro areas, and held that Section 2 did not require the additional district, so VRA compliance could not justify the state’s race-conscious line-drawing in Louisiana v. Callais⁵. Anyone who pretends that federal review always protects rights and never creates constitutional pressure is ignoring the record.

But that is not an argument for the present mess. It is an argument for a better front-end rule.

The problem with the current system is that it rewards sequence. A state can draw an aggressive map, defend it as partisan rather than racial, ask courts not to disrupt the coming election, and then litigate the remedy for years. After Rucho v. Common Cause⁹, federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymandering claims because the Supreme Court held they present political questions without manageable judicial standards. That means the race-party overlap common in the South now does enormous legal work. If a map cracks Black voters, the state can say it was chasing Republicans and Democrats, not Black and white voters. After Callais, that defense is stronger.

The latest fights prove the point. The Texas Tribune¹⁰ reported that the Supreme Court cleared Texas’s newly redrawn congressional map for use in the 2026 midterms, ending for now a fight over a mid-decade effort that aimed to add as many as five Republican seats. Days later, the Texas Tribune¹¹ reported that Callais made Section 2 claims harder to win and could reopen the record in Texas litigation over both the 2021 and 2025 maps. In Virginia, the state Supreme Court on May 8, 2026, struck down a voter-approved Democratic redistricting plan on procedural grounds, making the referendum result meaningless and dealing Democrats another setback in the national redistricting battle, according to the Associated Press¹².

This is the new mapmaking: state legislatures draw, litigants sue, emergency motions decide which map governs, and appellate courts sometimes finish the legal analysis after voters have already acted. The ballot is becoming the last step, not the decisive one.

A modern preclearance system would not need to resurrect every flaw of the old one. Congress could use current data, objective triggers, short review windows, public explanations, and explicit safeguards against racial predominance. It could require expedited review of congressional maps before candidate filing deadlines. It could make the test anti-dilution, not racial-maximization: no quotas, no command to draw majority-minority districts wherever numerically possible, but also no permission to run out the clock on voters with credible Section 2 claims.

The alternative is what we have now: a democracy where “who votes for whom” matters less than “which judge, on which date, under which emergency posture.” That is too much constitutional power to lodge in timing.

My prediction is that Callais will not calm redistricting litigation; it will redirect it. Watch three indicators before the 2026 midterms: (1) whether Louisiana successfully replaces SB8 after ballots had already gone out, (2) whether Texas courts apply Callais to reopen or narrow pending racial-discrimination claims, and (3) whether Congress even attempts a new preclearance formula. If those three move in the same direction, the post-Voting Rights Act map will not be built by voters at all. It will be built by whoever controls the docket first.