The Callais Supreme Court Decision and the Voting Rights Act: Context & Analysis
May 27, 2026
The Voting Rights Act and Louisiana v. Callais together mark one of the most consequential turning points in American election law in a generation. For sixty years, the Voting Rights Act has stood as the statute that put muscle behind the Fifteenth Amendment‘s promise that no citizen would be denied the ballot on account of race. In April 2026, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that may shape the next sixty. The Court ruled that states cannot use race as a basis for drawing legislative districts in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, except in narrow circumstances. The decision is dense and bound up in decades of constitutional argument, but its practical reach is wide.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fifteenth Amendment
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was, in essence, an enforcement statute. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, had guaranteed that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of race. For nearly a century, that guarantee was honored mostly in the breach. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and entire systems requiring Black citizens to be vouched for by a white neighbor kept African Americans away from the polls across much of the South.
The law had two main mechanisms. Section 2 prohibited any voting practice that resulted in racial discrimination, anywhere in the country. Sections 4 and 5 went further, requiring jurisdictions with a documented history of discrimination, most of them Southern, to obtain federal pre-clearance before changing voting procedures. The pre-clearance regime worked. Black voter registration and turnout rose sharply in covered jurisdictions, often surpassing rates in parts of the country never subject to federal supervision.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that the coverage formula was outdated and could no longer be enforced unless Congress refreshed it. Congress has not done so. That left Section 2 doing the bulk of the Voting Rights Act’s work.
Section 2, the Gingles Test, and Majority-Minority Districts
Section 2’s most visible application turned out to involve not literacy tests but lines on a map. The earliest battles were fought over local government, where at-large elections allowed white majorities to control city councils and county commissions even in places with substantial Black populations. Courts pushed those jurisdictions toward smaller districts in which minority voters could elect candidates of their choice.
The principle then migrated to congressional and state legislative redistricting. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the Supreme Court laid out a three-part test. A challenger had to show that a minority population was sufficiently large and geographically compact to form a majority in a district, that it voted as a cohesive bloc, and that the white majority voted as a bloc to defeat its preferred candidates. Where those conditions were met, those drawing the lines were expected to create majority-minority districts.
In the 1990s, an unexpected coalition emerged between Black Democratic legislators, who wanted descriptive representation in Congress, and white Republican legislators, who recognized that packing reliably Democratic Black voters into a few districts would dilute Democratic strength elsewhere. The result was an explosion of majority-minority districts, some of them shaped so oddly that the joke in North Carolina was that you could be in two congressional districts at once by opening your car door on the freeway.
That joke became a lawsuit. In a long line of cases, the Court ruled that race could not be the predominant factor in drawing district lines, but it never quite answered the question lurking beneath the surface: if the Voting Rights Act seems to require the use of race in some circumstances, and the Constitution forbids the use of race in most circumstances, which one wins?
Inside the Louisiana v. Callais Decision
Louisiana v. Callais grew out of the post-2020 redistricting cycle. Louisiana drew a congressional map with one majority-minority district. A group of Black voters sued, arguing that a second was required by Section 2. The lower courts agreed, and the state complied. A second lawsuit then followed, filed by voters who described themselves as non-minority, arguing that the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Writing for a six-justice majority, Justice Samuel Alito framed the central question this way: does the Constitution permit the intentional use of race to comply with the Voting Rights Act? The answer, with rare exception, is no. Race can be used only to remedy clear, intentional, ongoing discrimination by the state itself. Justice Clarence Thomas, in concurrence, went further, arguing that Section 2 does not apply to the line-drawing process at all.
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented sharply. The majority, she wrote, had misread its own precedents and abandoned the Voting Rights Act’s core protective function. Because race and partisanship are tightly correlated in much of the country, especially in the South, allowing states to redistrict for purely partisan ends will reduce minority representation in fact, even if it does not name race as the reason.
The Future of Race, Redistricting, and the Voting Rights Act
The practical effects will not be uniform. In states like Tennessee, where Republican majorities are large enough to absorb significant redistricting moves, legislators have already signaled their intent to redraw lines for partisan advantage. In states with thinner Republican margins, breaking up majority-minority districts could spread the party’s voters too thinly and cost it seats. Democratic-controlled states face their own version of the dilemma.
There is a longer history here as well. Justice Felix Frankfurter once warned that redistricting was a “political thicket and mathematical quagmire,” a fight the courts should mostly stay out of. Justice John Marshall Harlan predicted in the 1960s that strict one-person-one-vote rules would simply push gerrymandering away from geography and toward partisanship. Both have, in their way, been vindicated. Callais reads as the Court’s attempt to extricate itself, however selectively, from a half-century of refereeing the most contentious work American legislatures do. Whether that retreat protects democratic self-government or undermines it is the question the country will be answering for years to come.