How far did the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision go?

The Supreme Court’s invalidation of Louisiana’s congressional map has triggered a swirling debate about just how fundamentally the justices altered the Voting Rights Act landscape. 

Even the justices themselves disagree. The conservative majority brands it as merely an update. The liberal dissenters say it’s nothing short of demolishing the landmark 1965 law. 

It has left states scrambling to make sense of it as they consider racing to redraw their maps in advance of this year’s midterm elections.

The changes, explained 

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has enabled groups to force states to draw additional majority-minority districts for decades. 

The provision bars voting maps that give a racial minority “less opportunity than other members of the electorate” to elect their preferred candidate.

Wednesday’s decision doesn’t strike down Section 2. It changes the multi-step framework, called the Gingles test, that the Supreme Court established in the 1980s to parse the law’s dense language and decide challenges. 

The decision makes it more difficult for minority groups to clear the test in three ways. 

First, when a challenger offers a proposed design for a new majority-minority district, it must meet certain requirements. 

The challenger can’t consider race while drawing it. Justice Samuel Alito said that would have “no value.” It must also still meet “all the State’s legitimate districting objectives.” The court said that includes state leaders’ political aims, like efforts to keep incumbents within a boundary. 

Second, challengers must show the racial patterns can’t be explained by partisanship. 

It adds to a series of Supreme Court decisions strengthening requirements that plaintiffs “disentangle” race and politics. For example, Alito said challengers could point to........

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