Southern US states are rushing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate Democratic districts and dilute the influence of Black voters in electing candidates. This aggressive push, prompted by the US Supreme Court’s decision gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is occurring even in some states where congressional primaries have already begun.
Tennessee and Louisiana Lead the Charge
Tennessee Republicans have already enacted a new map, carving up the majority-Black city of Memphis into three different congressional districts to eliminate the state’s lone Democrat in Congress. Louisiana, at the center of the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, is on the verge of implementing a map that would eliminate the seat of one of its two Black Democrats in Congress. Alabama has successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to allow it to eliminate a district currently represented by a Black Democrat, replacing it with a map previously ruled to be intentionally discriminatory.
South Carolina and Other States
In South Carolina, the Republican governor is reportedly poised to call a special session to redraw the map and eliminate the district held by Jim Clyburn, a powerful Black House Democrat. Georgia and Mississippi have opted against redrawing ahead of midterm elections this year but are likely to do so before 2028. States like Texas, Missouri, Florida, and North Carolina, which already added Republican districts, could also redraw maps again.
“This is a five-alarm fire for Black representation in the south,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The [supreme] court has signaled it’s going to be a redistricting wild west, and there will be no sheriff around.”
Unprecedented Cancellation of Primaries
Alabama and Louisiana have taken the unprecedented step of canceling primary elections after voting was underway. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry stated, “Those ballots are discarded and those voters will vote again in November.” More than 42,000 ballots were cast in Louisiana before the cancellation. “If anybody has a grievance, take it to the United States supreme court,” Landry said.
The Congressional Black Caucus, at an all-time high of 58 members, faces potential decimation. Democrats are considering a counteroffensive in states like New York, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, though they face hurdles due to state restrictions on partisan gerrymandering.
Legal Challenges and Supreme Court Role
The American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennessee over its new map, seeking to invalidate it on constitutional grounds. Civil rights groups have asked a federal court in Alabama to block the 2023 map after it was found to intentionally discriminate against Black voters. A conservative legal organization has also cited the Callais decision to challenge the Illinois voting rights act, testing whether the Supreme Court’s ruling can weaken state-level voting rights acts.
Election experts note that canceling elections after votes are cast, absent a natural disaster, is unprecedented. “It’s not rolling things back to where they were in 2010. It’s rolling things back to where they were in 1975,” said Stuart Naifeh of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “The risk is that Black representation will disappear from the south and potentially other places too. And Latino representation as well.”
The chaotic redrawing process has been facilitated by the Supreme Court itself. For decades, the court avoided intervening in elections close at hand, but recent decisions have allowed last-minute changes. In December, the justices blocked a lower court order striking down Texas’s map as racially discriminatory, citing the proximity to the March primary. In February 2022, the court similarly ruled it was too late for Alabama to implement a new map before its May primary. However, on Monday, the court allowed Alabama to implement a new map just over a week before a scheduled primary, drawing criticism for inconsistency.
“You don’t need a law degree to see how inconsistently the court is behaving in these cases,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. “Inconsistency is bad enough, but now you have a court that has shown itself willing to step in, even when it knows the result of it stepping in is that votes are going to be thrown out.”
