National redistricting war reignites with Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling

The Supreme Court’s decision to weaken a key part of the Voting Rights Act has reignited a national redistricting war likely to have widespread implications for voters across the country.

The high court on Wednesday handed down its much-awaited ruling on Louisiana’s House map, striking down its second majority-Black district. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in their 6-3 decision, called Louisiana’s congressional lines “an unconstitutional gerrymander” and curtailed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars election practices that deny equal access to the political process based on race.

Alito cast the decision as an “update” on how race will be evaluated in redistricting.

This move, however, will have downstream impacts after months of back and forth over redistricting across the country, first ignited by President Trump in Texas as he sought to boost the GOP’s chances of holding on to the House majority this November. Democrats responded in California and Virginia.

Given Wednesday’s decision, though, some Republican leaders in southern states, in particular, are calling for new maps — despite primary elections in some states, including Louisiana and Georgia, kicking off next month.

“Election administration is not just like a thing you turn on and off,” Decision Desk HQ’s Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley told The Hill. 

“If you redrew the congressional districts, you’d have to sort of reset that entire process and obviously delay the primary,” he added.

While a handful of states, including Texas, Illinois and North Carolina, held their primaries last month, the high court’s decision has raised questions about whether states will be allowed to redistrict before the November general election.

The Supreme Court has previously ruled that changes to how elections are conducted or held shouldn’t be done too close to the actual election, but they didn’t provide any guidance in Wednesday’s decision. To further complicate matters, most candidate filing deadlines for states have since passed as well.

Skelley suggested that Georgia, for example, which is slated to hold its primary on May 19, isn’t likely to........

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