After Callais: How the Supreme Court's Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Launched a Redistricting Free-for-All Across the South

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that rewrote four decades of voting rights law in a single morning [1]. Within 48 hours, governors in Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee had called or announced special legislative sessions. Mississippi's governor set a timeline to follow. Florida had already signed new maps into law. By the end of the first week of May, the most consequential redistricting scramble since the post-census cycle of 2021 was underway — with no census to justify it [2].

The ruling did not formally strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, described the opinion as a "proper interpretation" of the statute [3]. But by requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination — rather than demonstrating discriminatory effects, the standard courts had applied since Congress amended the VRA in 1982 — the decision gutted the provision that had served as the primary legal tool for challenging racially gerrymandered maps [4].

Justice Elena Kagan, reading her dissent from the bench, said the majority had rendered Section 2 "all but a dead letter" [1].

The Legal Architecture: From Shelby County to Callais

To understand the magnitude of the Callais decision, it must be placed alongside two prior rulings that progressively dismantled the Voting Rights Act's enforcement machinery.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down Section 5's preclearance formula, which had required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination — mostly in the South — to obtain federal approval before changing voting rules [5]. That decision removed the front-end safeguard. Section 2, which allowed after-the-fact challenges to discriminatory maps, remained intact.

In Allen v. Milligan (2023), the Court surprised observers by upholding a Section 2 challenge to Alabama's congressional map, ordering the state to create a second district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in a 5-4 decision that seemed to reaffirm Section 2's continued vitality [6].

Callais reversed that trajectory. The majority opinion, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, held that Louisiana's 2024 congressional map — redrawn under court order to include a second majority-Black district — constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander [1]. The decision imposed a new framework requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate "present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting," with historical discrimination and ongoing racial disparities carrying "much less weight" [3].

Justices Thomas and Gorsuch wrote a concurrence questioning whether Section 2 regulates redistricting at all [1].

Which States Are Moving — and How Fast

The ruling's effects have been immediate. Republican-led states across the South are seizing the opportunity to redraw maps before the 2026 midterm elections, in what analysts at Democracy Docket have called "a scramble to destroy Black political power" [7].

Source: CBS News / Democracy Docket analysis

Data as of May 5, 2026CSV

Louisiana suspended its May 16 congressional primaries — with absentee voting already underway — to give lawmakers time to eliminate the second majority-Black district that had been in place since a court order following Allen v. Milligan. Governor Jeff Landry and the Republican-controlled legislature moved to restore a map with one majority-Black district instead of two [8]. Voting rights groups immediately sued to force the primaries to proceed on schedule [7].

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey called an extraordinary session of the state legislature to redraw both congressional and state senate districts. The state is expected to attempt to reinstate the pre-Milligan congressional map used in 2022, which contained only one majority-Black district. Alabama's current court-ordered map, in use for the 2024 elections, includes two districts with substantial Black populations [9]. A federal court order mandating the two-district map remains nominally in effect until the 2030 census, setting up a direct conflict between state and federal authority [10].

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee called a special session beginning May 5 after a conversation with President Donald Trump [11]. The target: the Memphis-area 9th Congressional District, held by Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen and the only remaining Democratic seat in Tennessee's nine-member delegation. The proposed maps would split Memphis's Black voter base among surrounding rural districts. Senator Marsha Blackburn, running for governor, called for a 9-0 Republican delegation [12].

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced a special session to begin approximately May 20, targeting the state's 2nd Congressional District — a majority-Black district represented by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the longest-serving member of Mississippi's delegation [13].

Florida moved before the ruling was even final. Governor Ron DeSantis signed new congressional maps that analysts say could net Republicans as many as four additional seats [2].

Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina have signaled interest in redistricting as well, with Texas alone potentially adding five Republican-leaning seats [14].

The Incumbents in the Crosshairs

The redistricting push puts specific members of Congress at direct risk of losing their seats — not through electoral defeat at the ballot box, but through the elimination of the districts that elected them.

In Louisiana, Rep. Troy Carter (D), who represents the newly created 6th Congressional District — the second majority-Black seat — faces the most immediate threat. The state legislature's plan to collapse the map back to one majority-Black district would effectively erase his constituency [8].

In Alabama, Rep. Shomari Figures (D), elected in 2024 from the court-ordered 2nd Congressional District, could see his district redrawn to no longer favor a Black-preferred candidate. The state also plans to target its state senate maps [9].

In Tennessee, Rep. Steve Cohen (D) has represented the Memphis-based 9th District since 2007. Cohen acknowledged publicly that the proposed remap could end his congressional career, as Memphis's Black voter base — which has consistently elected him — would be divided among more conservative rural districts [12].

In Mississippi, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D) has held the 2nd Congressional District since 1993. A redraw dispersing the district's majority-Black population would likely flip the seat [13].

Historical precedent offers a grim outlook for these incumbents. After court-ordered redistricting in Texas between 2011 and 2013, incumbents placed in substantially redrawn districts lost at significantly higher rates than those in stable seats. In North Carolina's protracted 2016–2020 redistricting litigation, multiple incumbents opted to retire rather than run in unfavorable new districts [15].

28 Lawsuits Derailed

The Callais decision's impact extends far beyond the states actively redrawing maps. According to research by Democracy Docket, the ruling has derailed at least 28 pending lawsuits challenging racially gerrymandered maps under Section 2 [7].

Source: Democracy Docket

Data as of May 5, 2026CSV

The geographic concentration of affected cases is heavily Southern. Georgia leads with five affected cases, followed by Louisiana and Texas with four each, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina with three each, and South Carolina with two. Only two of the roughly 28 affected cases — a challenge to judicial districts in Indiana and state legislative districts in North Dakota — fall outside the South [7].

The ruling's impact on state legislative and local maps may ultimately prove more significant than its effect on congressional seats. As the Stateline news service reported, the decision "is set to reshape local power from statehouses to school boards" [16].

The Packing Paradox: Do Majority-Minority Districts Help or Hurt?

One of the less intuitive dimensions of this debate concerns whether majority-minority districts actually serve minority voters' long-term political interests — or whether they function as a form of containment.

The "packing critique," advanced by some voting rights scholars, holds that concentrating minority voters into a single district maximizes their ability to elect one representative of their choice but simultaneously minimizes their influence in all surrounding districts [17]. This dynamic has been documented empirically: research published in the Political Research Quarterly found that while majority-minority districts increase minority representation, they also decrease Democratic representation overall, amplifying Republican influence in adjacent seats [18].

The counterargument, made forcefully by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Brennan Center, is that without majority-minority districts, minority communities in the South have historically been unable to elect any candidates of their choice. As late as 2015, 88 percent of Black representatives in the House had been elected from majority-minority districts [19]. The 1992 redistricting cycle, which created dozens of new majority-minority seats following the 1990 census, produced 16 new African American and eight new Latino members of Congress [19].

The effectiveness of these districts in electing minority-preferred candidates has been high in the short term. However, success rates vary by state and office type. At the state legislative level, majority-minority districts in Deep South states have consistently elected Black legislators at rates exceeding 90 percent within two election cycles of their creation [18]. At the congressional level, the record is similarly strong: the two court-ordered districts in Alabama and Louisiana both elected Black representatives in their first elections under the new maps (2024). Where the remedy has been less effective is in jurisdictions where the minority population is more geographically dispersed, making the creation of compact majority-minority districts difficult without extreme gerrymandering [17].

The Cost of Compliance — and Defiance

Redistricting carries tangible financial costs. California's recent redistricting-driven special election carried a price tag of $282 million, including $251 million for county election administration and $31 million in state costs for voter outreach and information guides [20]. While Southern states' special sessions and potential special elections will be smaller in scale, the costs accumulate: legal fees for defending and challenging maps, administrative overhead for election officials forced to implement new district boundaries on compressed timelines, and the voter confusion that accompanies mid-cycle changes.

When states resist court-ordered redistricting, the costs escalate further. Texas's prolonged standoff over redistricting from 2011 to 2013 involved years of litigation, multiple rounds of court-drawn interim maps, and legal fees running into the tens of millions of dollars borne by taxpayers [15]. North Carolina's redistricting battles between 2016 and 2020 followed a similar pattern, with the state paying millions in legal fees and court costs while maps were struck down and redrawn repeatedly [15].

Federal courts have limited but real enforcement mechanisms for compelling compliance. These include holding state officials in contempt, imposing court-drawn maps, and ordering special elections under judicially approved districts. The practical timeline for these standoffs, based on the Texas and North Carolina precedents, ranges from two to four years — meaning that even if new legal challenges to post-Callais maps succeed, the redrawn maps could be in place for the 2026 and possibly 2028 elections before any remedy takes effect [15].

The Legal Counteroffensive

The ruling has not gone unchallenged. Democrats and voting rights organizations are pursuing multiple avenues of resistance.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled that New York Democrats would pursue their own redistricting as a counterweight, seeking to offset anticipated Republican gains in the South [21]. At the state level, lawsuits have already been filed challenging Louisiana's suspension of its primaries [7].

Legal scholars are divided on whether the Court overreached its precedent in Allen v. Milligan or whether it failed to go far enough in either direction. Supporters of the ruling, including the conservative legal movement that has long argued against race-conscious redistricting, contend that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits drawing districts primarily on the basis of race, even for remedial purposes [3]. They argue that Callais correctly aligns Section 2 with the Constitution's colorblind mandate.

Critics counter that the intent standard is functionally unworkable. The Campaign Legal Center called the decision an "evisceration" of the VRA, noting that requiring proof of intentional discrimination in the redistricting context — where map-drawers rarely leave explicit evidence of racial animus — makes successful challenges nearly impossible [4]. A Slate analysis called it "the worst decision in a century" for voting rights [22]. FairVote noted that the ruling may accelerate interest in alternative electoral systems, such as proportional representation, that do not depend on majority-minority single-member districts to produce minority representation [23].

The Trump administration's Department of Justice, for its part, signaled it would use the ruling affirmatively, with officials stating they are "ON IT" in pursuing cases where existing majority-minority districts might now be challenged as racial gerrymanders [7].

What Comes Next

The immediate future is a compressed timeline of legislative maneuvering and litigation. Tennessee's special session began May 5 [11]. Alabama's legislature is already in extraordinary session [9]. Louisiana is racing to draw new maps before rescheduling its suspended primaries [8]. Mississippi's session is expected to begin around May 20 [13].

Each of these efforts will face legal challenges. But the Callais ruling has shifted the burden of proof so substantially that the prospects for successful challenges under Section 2 are now dim. The 28 pending cases identified by Democracy Docket represent years of legal work that must now be substantially reconceived or abandoned [7].

The question that will define the next decade of American electoral politics is whether the dismantling of Section 2's effects test, combined with the earlier gutting of Section 5's preclearance requirement, will produce a lasting shift in congressional representation — or whether counter-redistricting by blue states, demographic change, and potential congressional action to restore the VRA will offset the impact.

For now, the map-drawers are at work.

Source: SCOTUSblog / Brennan Center

Data as of May 5, 2026CSV