Voting rights and wrongs in America

In an ideal world, voting districts would be calmly demarcated by an impartial computer. In America the job is often done by state legislatures, in effect granting politicians the power to pick their own voters. Parties want to maximise their tally of seats. Incumbents want to maximise their chances of re-election. And the courts try to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965 to end racial discrimination in elections.

Under Jim Crow, discrimination meant preventing blacks in the South from voting, often via poll taxes and impossible literacy tests from which whites were largely exempted. Today, Americans disagree as to what counts as discrimination. Some think states should maximise the number of majority-black districts wherever practical, so that blacks can, as the Supreme Court put it in 1986, “elect their preferred representatives”. Others think that this approach is itself racially discriminatory, violating the constitution’s equal protection clause, and that maps should be drawn without regard to skin colour. Almost no one trusts politicians to do any of this fairly.

Section two of the Voting Rights Act allows plaintiffs to sue states for drawing districts that dilute the power of minority voters. In the past four decades 466 such cases have gone to court. Most were in the South and over local races, such as for city councils and school boards (see chart). But they have also shaped Congress. In 2024 Shomari Figures, a black Democrat, was elected after a lawsuit forced Alabama to create a new majority-minority district stretching from Mobile to Montgomery. Now a legal challenge in another state, Louisiana v Callais, threatens to rejig the lines again.

Blacks are one-third of Louisiana’s voters, but a map drawn up after the 2020 census included only one majority-black district out of six. Black plaintiffs sued, and a court ordered the creation of a second such district. But then a group of “non-African American voters” challenged that change, calling it “racially balkanising”. A different court ruled in their favour, striking down the redrawn map.

The case reached the Supreme Court last March, and a second oral argument was heard in October. Conservative justices sounded ready to make it much harder for plaintiffs to challenge maps for allegedly diluting the influence of minority voters. If the ruling, expected this spring, goes that way, a quarter or more of the congressional black caucus might be voted out.

But the fallout might not be quite so simple. James Carville, a Democratic strategist from New Orleans, says a ruling perceived as anti-black could help Democrats. How do you get the 25-year-old black car mechanic in Atlanta to go to the polls? Tell him Republicans don’t respect you and they are counting on you not to vote, he says. Surveys show that younger black voters care more about the economy than civil rights. But if the VRA is seen as under threat, that could change. “This would jack up anger in the African-American community, and anger drives turnout,” says John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster.

Turnout matters most in statewide races, which cannot be gerrymandered. (State borders are not up for discussion, unless you count Greenland.) Raising black turnout could matter a lot in the South. Blacks are numerous there, and cast ballots at lower rates than whites do. In North Carolina Democrats could win more statewide ballots if voters in Charlotte, a mostly black and Hispanic city, turned out as much as those in (whiter) Raleigh and Durham, says Morgan Jackson, a political operative. The same could hold in Georgia, perhaps the South’s most purple state.

Louisiana’s filing deadline for congressional candidates is on February 13th, so the Supreme Court is unlikely to rule in time to let Republicans remove one or both of their state’s majority-black districts before this year’s midterm elections. Michael Li of the Brennan Centre, a think-tank, thinks the same is true in other southern states. But district lines for future elections could change.

If they do, Nick Stephanopoulos of Harvard says that Republicans would enjoy a “structural advantage” in the House of Representatives and state legislatures for “as long as the current political coalitions last”.

Those conditions include deep partisan distrust. President Donald Trump, who tried to overturn the result of an election he lost in 2020, spoke this week of “nationalising” elections, deploying the federal government to states where he claims, without evidence, that voter fraud is rife. The White House downplayed his (unconstitutional) suggestion, but Democrats are nervous. Mr Figures says his district, a cradle of the civil-rights struggle, “knows what’s at stake”. ■