The Supreme Court’s recent ruling threatens the power of racial-minority voters in Voting Rights Act cases about not just Congress, but also at least 17 state and local governments, NPR finds.
Read more: Why the Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling could play a big role at the local level
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The Supreme Court’s recent decision to undermine the Voting Rights Act is sending shockwaves across the country. That ruling struck down a Louisiana congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But the impact goes well beyond maps for Congress. NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang reports.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: NPR has found active legal fights over at least 17 voting maps or election systems for state legislatures, county commissions, school boards or other local governments. All of them are now reckoning with the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act, specifically its Section 2 protections against discrimination of minority voters in places where voting is racially polarized.
MICHAEL LI: What Section 2 did is it helped break down political fiefdoms that existed in the South.
WANG: Michael Li is a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that advocates for expanding voting access.
LI: 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.
WANG: Most of the active Section 2 cases were brought by Black voters in the South, but not all. Native American voters are in a legal fight over North Dakota’s legislative map, and Latino voters are challenging how members of a local Pennsylvania school board are elected. Gilda Daniels, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, says the Supreme Court’s ruling has encouraged opponents of local majority-minority districts to come up with new ways of getting rid of them.
GILDA DANIELS: It’s very important for folks to be vigilant and to participate on the local levels, ensuring that they’re aware of what’s happening. ‘Cause there are some jurisdictions that could decide, you know, we’re going to move from districts to at-large.
WANG: At-large voting systems, where no voting districts are involved, have been challenged with many voting rights lawsuits over the decades, says Maureen Edobor, an assistant law professor at Washington and Lee University.
MAUREEN EDOBOR: 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.
WANG: In Tennessee’s Fayette County, Elton Holmes, president of the local NAACP branch, is bracing for more setbacks for Black voters after the Supreme Court’s latest weakening of the Voting Rights Act.
ELTON HOLMES: I’ll just put it like this – I don’t think the majority of the citizens of the United States realized what had just happened.
WANG: Last year, Holmes’ NAACP branch led a Section 2 lawsuit over the voting map for Fayette County’s Board of Commissioners. Its members are all white. Eventually, the county agreed to a new map where 3 out of 10 voting districts are majority Black. The county recently held its first primary election under the new districts.
HOLMES: Right now, the way I see it, if 2026 election doesn’t go too well, they will come back and put those gerrymandering maps back into play.
WANG: Get rid of those three majority-Black districts.
HOLMES: Yeah, they will eliminate the three minority-majority districts. Yeah.
WANG: Fayette County’s mayor, Rhea «Skip» Taylor, tells NPR he does not see any plans for doing any additional redistricting in the county before the 2030 census. But with a mid-decade gerrymandering fight for Congress still playing out in some parts of the country, Holmes says he doesn’t rule out more gerrymandering at the local level.
HOLMES: It’s just been a struggle. And then we finally get a little breakthrough, and then something else pop up to try to push it back some more.
WANG: Other voting rights advocates are also watching for changes to state and local voting maps. The advocacy groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund estimate the Supreme Court’s ruling has put at risk close to 200 Democratic held state legislative seats, mostly representing majority-Black districts in the South. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News.
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