The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/30/800030817/courts/the-supreme-courts-attack-on-voting-rights-is-already-causing-chaos/
The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos
The fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais has been as quick as it was inevitable. Justice Samuel Alito’s reprehensible 6-3 decision functionally killed the tiny bits of the Voting Rights Act that we were clinging to in the face of Chief Justice John Roberts’ decades-long crusade to end the VRA.
Louisiana wasted no time taking a victory lap, with Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill issuing a joint statement that the state was postponing its primaries even though early voting was already scheduled to begin on May 16.
In theory, Purcell v. Gonzalez, a 2006 Supreme Court decision, bars this sort of last-minute change to elections, the idea being that if election rules are changed too close to an election, that can result in voter confusion. However, conservative judges and justices have essentially turned this into “Purcell for thee but not for me.” Already-gerrymandered states like Georgia and North Carolina get the go-ahead to muck around close to elections, but for potential election changes that would enfranchise, rather than exclude, voters, somehow Purcell kicks in then.
“This is going to cause mass confusion among voters—Democrats, Republicans, white, Black, everybody,” said Louisiana state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat who represents the New Orleans area, reported the AP. “What they’re effectively doing is changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It’s rigging the system.”
Who knows what sort of chaos has been unleashed in Louisiana, but it’s definitely not great. Roughly one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black, but the state didn’t send a Black member to Congress until 1990, and when the Callais case began in 2022, there was still only one Black House member. Well, the Supreme Court seems to have ensured that in the future, that number will be zero.
Elsewhere, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, is hyped to find out that Alabama might have a green light to discriminate. Get excited! “The Court rightly acknowledged that the South has made extraordinary progress, and that laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality.”
This is, to put it bluntly, a straight-up lie. The South has not made extraordinary progress. Instead, ever since 2022’s Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a different part of the VRA, Black voter turnout has decreased, and the racial gap has widened. This decision will weaken Black and Hispanic turnout and representation even further, which was always the point.
Alabama hasn’t yet moved to redraw its maps, but they’re going to, and the GOP is no doubt thanking its lucky stars that this latest decision seems to implicitly reverse the 2023 Allen v. Milligan Supreme Court decision which had held that Alabama’s map diluted Black voting power. The state has been fighting that decision ever since and is currently barred from redrawing its districts until 2030, but hey, that can be solved by a quick little trip to the Supreme Court or something, can’t it?
Over in Texas, the state doesn’t really have to do anything because the Supreme Court already blessed its new maps openly designed to ensure a perpetual white GOP majority, which seems to be the only type of redistricting that is allowable now.
Related | How Democrats plan to fight the Supreme Court’s racist ruling
But hey, President Donald Trump is happy, and he’s the main client not just for the Department of Justice these days, but also for the conservatives on the Supreme Court who tenderly protect and approve almost everything Trump wants. The president immediately declared this was the “kind of ruling I like” and “a BIG WIN for Equal Protection under the Law.”
It’s a big win for John Roberts and it’s also a big win for the neo-Confederates who want to wipe out the Reconstruction Amendments and have a court happy to help. For everyone else, it’s a huge loss. Democrats are gearing up to fight fire with fire and do some on-the-fly redistricting, and they’re right to do so, but ultimately this sort of thing is corrosive and bad for democracy. John Roberts knows it. Samuel Alito knows it. Trump definitely knows it, and it’s exactly the future they want.
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