How Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act Worked, and What Louisiana v. Callais Changed

Louisiana's 6th Congressional District, as drawn in January 2024, was one of the odder shapes on the national map: a long, thin band running diagonally across the state from Shreveport in the northwest down toward Baton Rouge, picking up Black neighborhoods in Alexandria, Lafayette and smaller towns along the way. The legislature drew it that way on purpose. A federal judge had found that Louisiana's earlier map, which gave Black voters a realistic chance to elect their preferred candidate in only one of six districts in a state where roughly a third of residents are Black, likely violated the Voting Rights Act, and the legislature, under pressure from the courts and with the support of the Republican governor, drew a second district where Black voters were a majority. In November 2024, voters there elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat and former state senator. A group of voters who described themselves as non-African American sued, arguing that the new district was itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Their case, Louisiana v. Callais, went to the Supreme Court twice, and in 2026 the Court ruled against the district. To understand what that ruling did, you first need to understand the law it was interpreting, and how it had worked for four decades.

In short: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act let minority voters challenge district maps that diluted their votes, using a test the Supreme Court set out in 1986: a large and compact minority group, cohesive voting, and a white majority that usually voted as a bloc to defeat its choices. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided in 2026, the Court struck down Louisiana's second majority-Black district and narrowed the room states have to draw districts with race in mind to comply with Section 2, which is likely to reduce the number of such districts across the South.

The words of the law

Section 2 is short. As amended by Congress in 1982, it prohibits any voting qualification, standard, practice or procedure that results in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color. It adds that a violation is shown when, based on the totality of circumstances, the political process is not equally open to members of a protected group, in that they have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. And it includes a sentence, added as part of a Senate compromise, saying that nothing in the section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.

Two features of that language did most of the work for forty years. First, the word "results." Congress added it in 1982 to overturn a Supreme Court decision that had required proof that lawmakers intended to discriminate. Under Section 2, it was enough to show that a practice had a discriminatory result in context. Second, the disclaimer on proportional representation. Section 2 never guaranteed seats. It guaranteed an equal opportunity to elect.

Vote dilution: how a map can cancel votes without stopping anyone from voting

The idea at the heart of these cases can sound abstract, so here is the plain version.

Imagine a county where 35 percent of voters are Black and 65 percent are white, and where, election after election, Black and white voters prefer different candidates by wide margins. If the county elects five commissioners at large, everyone voting for all five seats, the white majority can win every seat, every time. No Black voter is turned away from the polls. Every ballot is counted. And yet the Black third of the county never elects anyone it chose.

Now draw five districts. If the lines are drawn so that the Black population is spread thinly across all five, called cracking, the same thing happens. If the lines pack nearly all Black voters into one district at 90 percent, called packing, they elect one commissioner while their votes in that district are largely wasted. If the lines follow where people actually live and draw a district where Black voters are a majority, or close to it, they have a real chance to elect a candidate in a district that is fair to them.

That is vote dilution. It is the reason Section 2 cases are usually about maps, and the reason the remedy in a successful case was usually a new district.

The Gingles test

In 1986, in Thornburg v. Gingles, a case about North Carolina legislative districts, the Supreme Court set out how courts should decide these claims. The test that came out of it has three preconditions, which became known as the Gingles factors.

1. A large and compact minority group. The minority group must be sufficiently large and geographically compact to make up a majority in a reasonably configured district. If you cannot draw a sensible district where the group is a majority, there is no remedy to order.
2. Political cohesion. The minority group must tend to vote together, preferring the same candidates.
3. White bloc voting. The white majority must vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority group's preferred candidates.

If plaintiffs proved all three, courts went on to look at the totality of circumstances, guided by a list of factors from the Senate's 1982 report: the history of official discrimination in the place, the extent of racial appeals in campaigns, how many minority candidates had won office, whether the minority group bore the effects of discrimination in education, employment and health, and similar evidence.

Plaintiffs typically proved their case with expert witnesses: demographers who drew illustrative maps showing that a reasonable additional district could exist, and political scientists who analyzed past election results to show voting patterns by race. Those cases were expensive and slow, but they worked. Many of the Black and Latino officials elected in the South and Southwest since the 1980s were elected from districts drawn as a result of Section 2 litigation or to avoid it.

The tension the law always lived with

Section 2 sat inside a constitutional tension that the Court had been worrying about since the 1990s, and the critics of the law deserve a fair hearing on it.

The Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause generally forbids the government from sorting people by race. In a line of cases beginning with Shaw v. Reno in 1993, the Court held that a district drawn predominantly on the basis of race is subject to strict scrutiny, the most demanding test in constitutional law, and is unconstitutional unless the state can show a compelling interest and a narrowly tailored design. For years the Court assumed, without fully deciding, that complying with Section 2 could be such a compelling interest.

So states were caught between two commands. Section 2 could require them to draw a district where a minority group had a fair chance to elect, which meant paying attention to race. The Equal Protection Clause punished them for paying too much attention to race. Critics of Section 2, including several justices, argued that this produced a system of permanent racial districting, sixty years after the law was written, and that the Constitution's guarantee is to treat individuals without regard to race, not to secure outcomes for groups. They also argued that race and party are so closely tied in the South that so-called racial vote dilution is often just partisan politics, which the Court said in 2019 that federal courts cannot police.

Defenders answered that vote dilution was real and measurable, that the Gingles test already required proof of racially polarized voting rather than assuming it, and that Congress had chosen the results test precisely because intent is almost impossible to prove and dilution can be devastating without it. They noted that the remedy was not a quota but a chance: districts drawn under Section 2 often elected the minority-preferred candidate, but nothing guaranteed it.

In 2023, in Allen v. Milligan, a five-justice majority reaffirmed the Gingles framework and ordered Alabama to draw a second district where Black voters had a fair opportunity. Louisiana's case had been on hold behind Alabama's, and once Milligan came down, the lower court's order to draw a second district in Louisiana moved forward. That is how the 6th District got its shape.

Callais: two arguments and a narrower law

The challengers in Callais argued that the 2024 map was a racial gerrymander, drawn with race as the predominant factor. A three-judge federal court agreed in 2024 by a vote of 2 to 1. The Supreme Court allowed the map to be used for the 2024 election, heard argument in March 2025 and then, unusually, set the case for reargument in its next term, asking the parties to address whether a state's intentional creation of a majority-minority district to comply with Section 2 violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment. The case was reargued in October 2025.

In 2026 the Court struck down the district. The decision narrowed what Section 2 can require of states when it comes to drawing districts with race in mind, and, in doing so, narrowed the protection that minority voters had relied on in redistricting cases since Gingles. The precise boundaries of the new rule are set out in the opinions, which run long and which lower courts will be applying for years; readers who want the Court's own summary can find it on our court watch page, which carries the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's summaries. Rather than paraphrase the holding beyond what the opinions say, this post leaves the fine print to them.

The practical effect is easier to describe. States in the South that had drawn, or been ordered to draw, additional districts where Black voters could elect their candidates now have more room to undo them, and voters challenging new maps face a harder legal road. Several Southern legislatures began considering new maps soon after the ruling.

What the ruling means, and what it does not

It is worth being careful about what Callais did not do.

It did not repeal Section 2; only Congress can repeal a statute, and the words of the law are unchanged. The case was about a district map, and challenges to other kinds of voting rules, such as polling-place and registration procedures, have their own line of cases, including the Court's 2021 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. It did not change the Fifteenth Amendment. And it did not decide any election; maps are drawn by legislatures, and voters still choose who wins in them.

What it did was shift the balance in the tension described above, away from the statute's results test and toward a stricter reading of the Equal Protection Clause. Combined with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which ended preclearance, and Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, which closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims, Callais leaves federal courts with fewer tools to police how district lines are drawn than at any time since the 1960s. The burden moves to Congress, state constitutions, state courts and voters.

Here's my argument, as opinion. The justices in the majority were sincere in their concern about racial classifications, and that concern has a long and honorable history. But a colour-blind map drawn in a place where voting is sharply polarized by race is not a neutral map. It is a map that lets the majority decide every seat. The Voting Rights Act was written because neutral-sounding rules had been used, for generations, to make Black votes count for nothing. Narrowing the law does not make that history go away.

Where the fight goes now

There are three places this moves.

Congress. Congress can rewrite Section 2. It did exactly that in 1982, after the Court required proof of intent. A new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, with Democratic majorities in both chambers. Whether it can pass a voting rights bill, and whether the president would sign it, are open questions.

State law. Several states have their own voting rights acts, which can protect minority voters in local elections even where federal law does not. California passed one in 2001, and it has pushed many cities, school districts and special districts there to switch from at-large to district elections. New York enacted its own in 2022, and other states have followed with versions of their own. These laws mostly govern local elections, not congressional maps, but local government is where many people first run for office and where most day-to-day decisions about schools, policing and land use are made. State constitutions and state courts are also increasingly central to redistricting fights.

Organizing and turnout. No court decides who wins an election. A district that is harder to win is not impossible to win, and coalitions across racial lines have won in places the maps were drawn against them.

You can follow all three through our coverage of voting rights and redistricting.

What you can do

• Know your maps. When your state legislature or a court redraws districts, look up which district you now live in through the representatives page, which finds your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators by address, with their latest votes.
• Show up at redistricting hearings. Legislatures usually hold public hearings before passing maps. Testimony about where communities actually live and what they share has mattered in court.
• Ask Congress to act. Contact your representative and senators and ask whether they will support legislation restoring the Voting Rights Act's protections.
• Make sure you can vote under whatever map you get. The voting page lists registration deadlines, voter ID and mail and early voting rules for every state.