On April 29, the Supreme Court issued a landmark 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that dramatically narrows how courts evaluate claims of racial vote dilution under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The decision, written by Justice Alito, involves Louisiana’s congressional map known as “SB8,” which was drawn to include a second majority-Black district after a lower court found the state’s earlier map likely violated the VRA. When Louisiana complied by drawing SB8, a separate group of plaintiffs challenged it as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed, and in doing so, it reshaped the legal landscape for minority voting rights.
Note: page numbers in parentheses refer to the majority opinion)
How We Got Here
After the 2020 census, Louisiana redrew its six congressional districts. A federal court in Robinson v. Ardoin found that the resulting map likely violated Section 2 of the VRA because it included only one majority-Black congressional district, despite Black voters making up about a third of Louisiana’s population (p. 12). Louisiana eventually responded by passing SB8, which added a second majority-Black district, District 6, that stretched roughly 250 miles from Shreveport in the northwest to Baton Rouge in the southeast, connecting pockets of Black population along the way (p. 16). Almost immediately, another set of plaintiffs sued, arguing that this race-conscious map violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. A three-judge federal panel agreed that SB8 was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and the Supreme Court took up the appeal (p. 16–17).
The Core Legal Question
The Court’s majority used this case to resolve a question that had gone unanswered for over 30 years: can compliance with the VRA justify a state’s deliberate use of race when drawing district lines? The answer, the majority said, is “yes”, but only under a much stricter and newly reinterpreted version of the VRA (p. 17–18).
To understand what the majority changed, it helps to know what Section 2 actually says. The law prohibits any voting “standard, practice, or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race.” It further defines a violation as occurring when the political process is “not equally open to participation” by minority voters – meaning they have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice” (p. 19). Congress chose this “results” language deliberately in 1982, after the Supreme Court had previously required proof of discriminatory “intent” in Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980) – a standard widely seen as nearly impossible to meet. The word “results” was Congress’s explicit signal that a plaintiff could win by showing a map’s effects on minority voting power, without having to prove the mapmakers acted with racial malice.
The majority, however, held that Section 2 must be read in light of the Fifteenth Amendment, which the Court has long interpreted to prohibit only intentional racial discrimination by the government. Because Congress can only enforce constitutional rights, not expand them, the majority concluded that Section 2 imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a “strong inference” of intentional discrimination (p. 23). Under the updated framework, plaintiffs must disentangle race from politics and other race-neutral factors in order to prevail, and a state that can point to partisan or traditional districting goals as the reason for its map will be in a stronger position to defeat a Section 2 claim (p. 25). Because Louisiana’s earlier map did not violate this stricter reading of Section 2, the state had no valid legal reason to draw SB8 along racial lines, and the new map therefore failed constitutional review (pp. 32–35).
Justice Kagan, in her dissent, noted that in practice, this means that a state can largely defeat a Section 2 claim by pointing to race-neutral or partisan reasons for its map, even if the map’s real-world effect is to minimize minority voters’ electoral influence.
The court majority was careful to say that absolute proof of intentional discrimination was not required under Section 2, instead, “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred” was the new standard. The opinion also proffered an example of what would be a Section 2 violation in today’s environment:
“Suppose, for example, that the application of a State’s districting algorithm yields numerous maps with districts in which the members of a minority group constitute a majority, and suppose that the State cannot provide a legitimate reason for rejecting all those maps and eliminating all majority-minority districts. In such a situation, the inference of racial motivation is strong, and §2 of the Fifteenth Amendment permits the imposition of liability without demanding that the courts engage in the fraught enterprise of attempting to determine whether the state legislature as an institution, as opposed to certain individual members or the State’s hired mapmaker, was motivated by race.”
What Is the Gingles Framework and What Changed?
For the past 40 years, courts have used a test from Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) to evaluate Section 2 vote-dilution claims, that is, claims that a districting map minimizes minority voters’ ability to elect representatives of their choice. The Gingles test required plaintiffs to meet three threshold conditions (“preconditions”) plus a broader “totality of circumstances” inquiry. The majority in Callais retained the Gingles framework but significantly tightened each of its components (p. 26). The most consequential changes are shown in the comparison below.
What This Means in Practice
Under the old framework, Louisiana’s failure to include a second majority-Black district would have been evaluated primarily by whether Black voters could form a reasonably drawn majority in a new district, and whether racially polarized voting prevented them from electing their preferred candidates. Under the new framework, the Court found that the plaintiffs in the underlying Robinson lawsuit failed at every step: their proposed illustrative maps did not protect the incumbents that Louisiana wanted to protect, their racial polarization evidence did not separate race from partisanship, and their historical evidence of discrimination was insufficient to show a risk of present-day intentional racial discrimination (pp. 33–35). Because the VRA did not actually require a second majority-Black district under this new reading, Louisiana had no compelling justification for race-conscious mapmaking, and SB8 was struck down.
The practical consequences of this ruling are significant. States can now assert partisan goals as a near-complete defense to Section 2 vote-dilution claims, since plaintiffs must draw alternative maps that satisfy the state’s political objectives just as well as the state’s own map, a bar that may be impossible to clear when racial identity and party affiliation are closely linked. Three justices dissented in an opinion authored by Justice Kagan, arguing that the majority had effectively returned Section 2 to the intent-based standard Congress explicitly rejected when it amended the law in 1982. Redistricting experts and civil rights advocates are likely to closely watch how lower courts apply the new Callais requirements in the coming election cycles.
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