VOTING RIGHTS BURIED ALIVE

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IS 61. THE ROBERTS COURT IS TRYING TO BURY IT ALIVE..

Sixty-one years after the Voting Rights Act became law, Black Americans still possess the right to vote. What the Supreme Court is dismantling is something more dangerous to entrenched power: the ability of those votes to change who governs.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court struck down Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district and imposed a new framework that makes racial vote dilution extraordinarily difficult to prove and remedy. Plaintiffs must produce compelling evidence of discriminatory intent, separate race from political affiliation and propose alternative maps that satisfy the state's political objectives without using race as a benchmark.

That is not colorblindness. It is a partisan escape tunnel.

In much of the South, Black voters disproportionately support Democrats because history, policy and racial polarization shaped that alignment. Under the Court's logic, legislators can divide Black communities, protect Republican incumbents and then insist that they attacked Democrats—not Black citizens.

Trumpism's favorite legal trick is to preserve racial hierarchy while deleting racial vocabulary.

Dēmos correctly distinguishes between two generations of voting rights. The first dismantled poll taxes, literacy tests and explicit barriers to casting a ballot. Those protections largely remain. The second addressed vote dilution: ensuring that Black and Latino citizens could elect representatives instead of merely participating in elections designed to neutralize them. Callais leaves much of the first generation standing while gutting the second.

The damage compounds earlier Roberts Court rulings. Shelby County disabled federal preclearance. Rucho removed partisan gerrymandering from federal judicial review. Alexander strengthened the presumption that legislators act in good faith. Now Callais makes racial-gerrymandering remedies harder to defend. The combined message is chilling: federal courts will not stop a map because it is excessively partisan, and they may reject the remedy when race is considered to repair its predictable racial consequences.

Mississippi lawmakers are already testing the new terrain. A joint committee has begun considering congressional, legislative and judicial redistricting and scheduled eight public hearings. Voting-rights advocates fear the process could dismantle majority-Black districts, including the district represented by Bennie Thompson, Mississippi's only Black and Democratic member of Congress. No final map has been adopted, but a hearing is not meaningful public participation when officials treat testimony as decoration for a predetermined outcome.

Democracy is not dead, however. Colorado Law professor Doug Spencer cautions against assuming that elections will disappear or that democratic defeat is inevitable. That is the correct warning against fatalism: institutions still exist, which means people must occupy, challenge and redesign them before their remaining protections are stripped away.

The answer cannot be begging the Supreme Court to restore yesterday's safeguards.

A third generation of voting rights must include state voting-rights acts, automatic and same-day registration, restored voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, transparent mapping data, an expanded House of Representatives and an explicit constitutional right to vote.

It should also include structural alternatives to single-member, winner-take-all districts. Multimember districts combined with proportional voting could make it harder for legislators to predetermine every seat by manipulating boundaries. Early modeling of Fair Representation Act-style systems suggests voters could gain more meaningful choices while many incumbents would retain electorally viable constituencies. That proposal requires rigorous testing, but it offers something the current map wars do not: representation without forcing every community's political existence through one carefully engineered line.

The National Urban League is right: Callais is not merely a Louisiana dispute. It threatens multiracial democracy nationally.

The Trump administration wants a democracy where Black citizens may vote—as long as their votes cannot rearrange power.

We need a democracy where voters choose their representatives, instead of politicians choosing which voters are allowed to matter.