The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act

On April 29th, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case which purported to examine whether Louisiana’s latest congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Design Observer was already in this story when it landed, and I want to tell you why and what we know. 

The 6-3 ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district and, while doing so, effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the last major enforcement mechanism left after Shelby County v Holder  took down Section 5 in 2013. (If you don’t understand all these details just yet, don’t worry — we have a plan for that.)

Justice Kagan said the quiet part clearly in her dissent, which she read aloud from the bench: this decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” She is right. And she added that only Congress — not six justices — had the authority to decide the law was no longer needed.

Redistricting is one of the most consequential design problems in American life: lines drawn on a map determine whose voice counts, whose neighborhood thrives, and whose representation vanishes. That is exactly the kind of design we exist to examine, and we’ve been on the ground since March doing exactly that. The story is complex, a series of escalating districting challenges designed to erode the power of Black and other “minority” voters. And because the story is complex and the history is nuanced, it’s easy to miss the project that was behind them.

What I keep returning to is this: these cases didn’t start as voting rights cases. Davante Lewis — a plaintiff in the original Robinson litigation, a Louisiana elected official, and one of the sharpest legal minds I’ve encountered — explained it to me this way when we spoke in Baton Rouge before the decision: “They start very narrow, and this has been the strategy — to have a narrowly defined issue that then you can make into a broader implication that can completely change the face of voting and civil rights in the country.” Shelby County is one of the counties in Alabama. Now, there is no preclearance — a highly effective tool under which municipalities with a history of racial discrimination were required to have requests to change voting districts reviewed by the Department of Justice— anywhere. Callais began as a single district along the Red River. Now, there may be no Black congressional representation in a state that is one-third Black, or anywhere else. 

Alanah Odoms, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said it plainly in a press call the morning after the decision: “Louisiana is the test case. It always has been. What works here will be exported.”

As Lewis, Odoms, and others predicted, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry moved immediately — calling for a redistricting measure and suspending the state’s congressional primaries, even though absentee ballots had already been received and early voting was set to begin Saturday for a consequential local election. State Sen. Royce DuPlessis, a Black Democrat from New Orleans, who has been focused on voting rights, told me that erasure has already begun. “This is going to cause mass confusion among voters — Democrats, Republicans, white, Black, everybody. What they’re effectively doing is changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It’s rigging the system,” he says.

That is not hyperbole.

Coalition is the hardest leadership work there is. It requires you to hold your own conviction while genuinely making room for someone else’s, and to find the place where those things become the same fight. Coalitions, many experts believe, are worth the effort, and are the greatest strength of a multiracial democracy. They are part of what’s being targeted, and what is required now.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued this case before the Supreme Court, told me that coalition is “messy and challenging and it does require compromise.” And yet, she said, it is also “some of the best of what we can do in this diverse country.”

The Power Coalition for Equity and Justice is living proof of that.

Ashley Shelton, the founder, has spent a decade building something that most people said couldn’t be built in Louisiana. “Everything that we’ve done, they told us we couldn’t do it. Every single thing,” she says. And then she listed them — non-unanimous juries, re-enfranchisement of formerly incarcerated people, expanded voting rights, and a second majority-minority congressional seat. All of it won, legally. All of it is now at risk. “I’m not waiting on anybody to let me do anything,” she said. That work — organized, strategic, and collective — is what we’re reporting on.

We are producing a ten-part podcast series called Draw the Line about this case, the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana, and the people who refuse to accept that this is how the story ends. We’ve been on the ground ahead of this story and understand clearly that the ripple effect is fast and profound. So we’re bringing the focus back to them and what happens now — because what is being dismantled in Louisiana was built for all of us in the US and beyond. And what replaces it will be, too.

More soon.

Ellen McGirt
Editor-in-Chief

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This edition of The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.

This is the web version of The Observatory, our (now weekly) dispatch from the editors and contributors at Design Observer. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. While you’re at it, come say hi on YouTube, Reddit, or Bluesky — and don’t miss the latest gigs on our Job Board.

Some fine print

New kids on the bloc? The cynical attempt to dissuade young, Black, male voters predicted the voting rights crisis we now face. By Ellen McGirt.

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Technical Designer at VCNY Home, North Bergen, NJ.

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End marks

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Read Design Observer’s interview with Yun here.

This is the web version of The Observatory, our (now weekly) dispatch from the editors and contributors at Design Observer. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. While you’re at it, come say hi on YouTube, Reddit, or Bluesky — and don’t miss the latest gigs on our Job Board.