Supreme Court Decides Louisiana v. Callais

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24-109, holding that because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provided no compelling interest to justify the state's use of race in drawing its federal congressional district map, rendering the map an unconstitutional gerrymander.

In 1965, following decades of state efforts to suppress the voting rights of black citizens, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) pursuant to its enforcement authority under the Fifteenth Amendment. Section 2 of the VRA stated that "[n]o voting qualification or pre­requisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Following amendments enacted in 1982, a plaintiff bringing a Section 2 claim was required to establish that the "political processes … are not equally open to participation" by protected class members 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."

In a number of subsequent cases, the Court held that, if challenged as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, a congressional map created to comply with the VRA would be subject to strict scrutiny; in those cases, the Court repeatedly assumed, without deciding, that compliance with the VRA, by itself, would constitute a sufficiently compelling interest to justify the use of race in redrawing a congressional map.

Following the 2020 census, the state of Louisiana redrew its congressional districts. Its new map included only one majority-black district. A federal district court judge found the map likely violated Section 2 of the VRA because it did not include a second majority-black district. The state redrew its map to contain such a district, while also protecting certain incumbents. The new map was again challenged, and a reviewing court of three federal judges found it effected an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and enjoined its use. Louisiana appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the decision of the three-judge court, holding that compliance with VRA did not provide a compelling interest for Louisiana's redistricting plan and that its new map violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Construing the language of Section 2, the Court interpreted three key phrases: "less opportunity," "other members of the electorate," and "to elect."

• The Court found that "opportunity" must mean a chance to achieve a desired result, since the VRA does not guarantee equal outcomes to the electoral process.
• "Other members of the electorate" specifies the comparator to be used in determining whether the protected group has suffered or is threatened with suffering less opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. In conceptualizing that comparator group, courts may think of a randomly selected voter who has particular voting preferences or a randomly selected group of voters who share certain voting preferences, which could be based on a candidate's party affiliation or other characteristics.
• The phrase "to elect" must refer to the achievement of electoral victory by casting a ballot.

The Court also reasoned that when a state uses a computer algorithm to generate congressional districts, as is generally the approach states now take, the resulting map may place a particular voter or group of voters in a district in which a majority generally agrees, generally disagrees, or only sometimes agrees with their voting preferences. But the "opportunity" of these "members of the electorate" to contribute their votes to a winning cause is whatever opportunity results from the combination of permissible criteria the state sets as the algorithmic parameters. That, the Court held, is all that Section 2 requires.

The Court also noted that this reading of Section 2 ensures that the statute does not exceed Congress's authority under the Fifteenth Amendment to enforce its prohibition against intentional racial discrimination.

The Supreme Court then explicated the criteria that a Section 2 challenger must meet. First, if a challenger presents illustrative alternative maps to show that a community of minority voters is sufficiently numerous and compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district, the Court instructed that the alternative maps must meet the state's legitimate districting objectives without using race as a districting criterion.

Second, when seeking to establish politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority, a challenger must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation. Simply pointing to inter-party political polarization, the Court found, proves nothing, since a state may lawfully engage in political gerrymandering even if the state is aware that the most loyal members of a particular political party happen to be members of a particular racial-minority group.

Last, when assessing the "totality of the circumstances," the court's inquiry must focus on evidence that has more than a remote bearing on present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting.

Applying this framework, the Court noted that Louisiana's action was subject to strict scrutiny since its underlying goal was racial: Its legislature configured a new district to achieve a black voting-age majority population because if it did not, the district court would likely find its map unlawful and order the use of one of the plaintiffs' alternative maps, which would have imperiled one of the influential incumbents the legislature sought to protect.

And, applying strict scrutiny, the Court held that Section 2 did not provide a compelling interest for the legislature's action since the State did not need to create a new majority-minority district to comply with the VRA. First, the challengers' alternative maps failed to meet the state's nonracial political goal of protecting incumbents. And while they offered evidence that black and white voters consistently supported different candidates, their analysis did not control for partisan preferences. They also failed to show an objective likelihood of intentional discrimination based on the totality of the circumstances, since none of the evidence they cited disentangled race from politics and was focused on intentional discrimination by Louisianian officials in the decades before the VRA was enacted rather than evidence of any recent intentional discrimination. Since no compelling interest justified the state's use of race, its new map was an unconstitutional gerrymander.

Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the Court, in which the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion, which Justice Gorsuch joined. Justice Kagan filed a dissent, in which Justices Sotomayor and Jackson joined.