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The US supreme court has ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map, in a landmark decision that effectively guts a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 specifically has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting

“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote for the majority opinion. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The court’s decision is a major upheaval in US civil rights law and gives lawmakers permission to draw districting plans that weaken the influence of Black and other minority voters. Some states may even rush ahead to try and redraw districts ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent that was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The majority claims only to be “updat[ing]” our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. In fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

“Today’s decision renders section 2 all but a dead letter,” she continued. “The decision here is about Louisiana’s District 6. But so too it is about Louisiana’s District 2. And so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the south, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.”

At the heart of the case, Louisiana v Callais, was a thorny question of how much lawmakers are allowed to consider race when they redraw districts to ensure that Black voters are adequately represented. The supreme court initially heard oral arguments in the case last March, but took the unusual step of asking lawyers to re-argue the case last fall. In setting the case for a re-argument, the justices raised the stakes of the case, asking lawyers to focus on whether section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was constitutional.

In its decision Wednesday, the court’s majority stopped short of saying outright that section 2 was unconstitutional. Instead, the majority significantly reworked a three-part test that plaintiffs need to pass in order to win a section 2 redistricting test. The new test is significantly harder to pass and designed to require plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination – an extremely difficult burden.

“In short, section 2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.

Such a declaration “is not only out of line with text, it is also out of line with the history of section 2”, Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote in a blog post. In 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to clarify that proving intentional discrimination was not necessary to win a case under section 2.

For decades, the first part of the three-part test in a section 2 lawsuit has required plaintiffs to show the minority group alleging discrimination is large and compact enough to constitute a majority in a single-member district. Alito’s decision adds two new requirements to this – plaintiffs may not consider race in drawing a hypothetical alternative map and must also ensure that it achieves the state’s traditional districting criteria and partisan goals.

That change alone is a major blow to the Voting Rights Act. In the US south, voting is highly racially polarized, so drawing a district that prevents racial discrimination is likely to also affect the partisan makeup of a map. It may be impossible for a state to achieve its partisan goals without discriminating against minority voters.

It also gives lawmakers virtually unlimited leeway to justify drawing districts that discriminate based on race, Kagan wrote.

“Suppose the state asserted that it drew the lines to protect an incumbent, who just so happened to be favored by Black residents,” she wrote. “The possibilities are endless. And each would have the same result. Because a section 2 plaintiff ’s map could not as well advance the bespoke political (or other) goal(s) favoring the Black voters’ chosen candidate, the suit would fail – even if non-Black votes, election year in and election year out, had been made to count for nothing.”

The second and third conditions of the traditional test requires plaintiffs to show that the minority group is politically cohesive and that the majority group votes as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. Alito’s new test requires plaintiffs to show that cohesiveness is driven specifically by race and not by party. That is extremely hard to do when race and party are often closely intertwined.

“So in offering evidence of polarized voting preferences, a plaintiff must remove from the equation … polarized voting preferences,” Kagan wrote. “Partisan difference is the way those divergent preferences are expressed – and the way one racial group’s vote can swamp another’s, again and again.”

As part of section 2 cases, courts have also looked at the “totality of circumstances” to assess whether the political process is equally open to minority voters. Plaintiffs often offer evidence of ongoing effects of the legacy of discrimination to show that discrimination still exists. The court’s new test says that evaluation must be focused on “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting”. Such direct evidence of intentional racial discrimination rarely exists.

“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” Alito wrote.

The decision comes after years of legal wrangling over the boundaries of the map.

After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled state legislature drew a new congressional map in which Black voters comprised a majority in just one district despite being about a third of the state’s population. A group of Black voters sued the state in 2022 under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the map diluted the influence of Black voters in the state by packing them into one district and spreading them out over the remaining ones.

The Black voters won the case and a federal judge blocked Louisiana from using the map and instructed the state to draw a new one with a second majority-Black district. The state complied, drawing a new map with a second-majority Black congressional district that stretches diagonally across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge.

But a group of non-Black voters challenged that new map, claiming that voters had unlawfully been sorted by their race in violation of the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. A three-judge panel agreed with those plaintiffs and blocked the new map from going into effect last year. That decision was paused by the supreme court and the remedial map was used in the 2024 election last fall’s election. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat.

During oral arguments in March, Edward Greim, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said it was obvious that race had predominated in drawing the district because it was so irregularly shaped.

But lawyers representing Louisiana as well as the Black voters who brought the original claim said that there was a clear explanation for the strange shape. When they were drawing the map, Louisiana Republicans had wanted to preserve the safe seats of the House speaker, Mike Johnson; the House majority leader, Steve Scalise; and Julia Letlow, a member of the House appropriations committee. They had rejected the possibility of drawing a more compact district in order to preserve those seats.