Will the Voting Rights Act Be Gutted? Supreme Court Could Decide Its Future.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map, a legal battle over whether states can use race as a factor in drawing electoral lines.

The dispute centers on whether Louisiana lawmakers ran afoul of the Constitution when they adopted a new electoral map in 2024, creating the state’s second majority-Black district.

But the case could have much broader implications for the law and for politics, potentially gutting the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sharply curtailed in recent years. If the justices decide that lawmakers cannot consider race in drafting maps, redistricting could result in congressional seats flipping from blue to red throughout the country.

The legal battle can be traced back to the 2020 census, which showed an increase in Louisiana’s population of Black adults. While Black Louisianans made up about a third of the state’s population, there was only one majority-Black congressional district out of six districts.

After the census, state lawmakers revisited the map and passed a version that still had only one majority-Black district. Two groups of Black voters then filed federal lawsuits in 2022, asserting that state legislators had violated the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into one district and diluting their voting power.

The Voting Rights Act, one of the central legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, banned discriminatory practices like literacy tests that had been used to disenfranchise people. It also prohibited measures aimed at denying minority voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.