A federal judge in Mississippi ruled on June 24 that DeSoto County’s 2022 electoral map does not violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, dismissing a challenge brought by the DeSoto County NAACP, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and two Black voters who alleged the map dilutes Black voting power across 25 local offices, including the Board of Supervisors, Board of Education, Election Commission, justice court judges, and constables. The U.S. District Court, applying the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, found the plaintiffs failed all three preconditions of the Gingles test – the threshold legal standard for proving vote dilution – and wrote: “Plaintiffs cannot prove their claims for vote dilution pursuant to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and judgment must be awarded to Defendants.” The ruling followed a two-week bench trial held in February in the federal courthouse in Oxford, in which the court examined over 300 exhibits and heard testimony from 36 witnesses, all before the Callais decision changed the governing legal standard on April 29.
DeSoto County, located just south of Memphis in northwest Mississippi, is one of the state’s fastest-growing counties, with a population of approximately 191,000. The county’s Black population has grown from 12% in the 2000 census to more than 36% today, yet none of the 25 county offices determined by the map is currently held by a Black person. The plaintiffs in this case (Harris v. Desoto County), represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Harvard Election Law Clinic, and voting rights attorney Amir Badat, argued the map splits Black population centers across districts, denying Black voters any opportunity to elect preferred candidates. The ACLU of Mississippi called the decision “deeply disappointing,” stating that the Callais opinion “pretends to adhere to the text of the Voting Rights Act” while “directing federal courts to close their eyes and ignore the clear results of discriminatory maps.”
The ruling is among the first to apply the Callais standard to local government redistricting, a category of litigation that accounts for nearly half of all Section 2 cases brought since the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act and that most directly affects the offices voters interact with in their daily lives. Democracy Docket noted the ruling “shows how Callais is beginning to reshape redistricting litigation beyond congressional maps and into local offices that often have the most direct effect on voters’ daily lives, including county boards and local courts.” The Harvard Election Law Clinic’s analysis on the Election Law Blog went further, arguing that Judge Davidson’s opinion demonstrates that the Callais decision effectively overruled the Supreme Court’s own 2023 holding in Allen v. Milligan, despite Justice Alito’s explicit claim in Callais that it did not, because the court treated “core retention” of existing district lines as a legitimate defense against a Section 2 claim, a position the court in Milligan had explicitly rejected. Additional local redistricting cases applying Callais are already in the pipeline; defendants in a separate challenge to East Baton Rouge Parish’s metro council map in Louisiana have argued that Callais supports dismissal of their case.
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