For while April might contain a disquieting blend of death and renewal — “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain” — in recent years, June has been the time when the high court delivers its most devastating blows against individual rights and the rule of law.

While November may hold elections, it has been June that is the cruelest month for our democracy.

As we enter June this year, the Court has yet to issue opinions in 26 cases. Among them are two that I was personally involved in litigating: National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC and Watson v. Republican National Committee.

Arguing before the Supreme Court is a highlight of any attorney’s career. I have had that honor five times. The first four cases I argued all involved voting rights and redistricting. I won each one of them.

I argued the fifth – NRSC v. FEC – in December. It was different in every way. 

The case concerned a core provision of federal campaign finance law — a limit on the amount of money a political party can spend in full coordination with its candidates. The Republican Party has spent my entire 30-year career arguing in court to strike down this limit. 

Indeed, the first brief I ever worked on in the Supreme Court involved an earlier GOP challenge to this same law in the 1990s. It survived Supreme Court review before — but that offers no guarantee this time.

What makes this case so unusual, however, is its procedural posture. In a normal administration, the Solicitor General would have been defending the federal law before the Supreme Court. But nothing about the Trump administration is normal.

Instead of defending a law that has been on the books for 50 years and has survived prior legal challenges, after Trump took office, the Department of Justice switched sides. It argued that the GOP was correct and the law should be struck down.

With no party left to defend the law, the Democratic Party moved to intervene in the Supreme Court to fill the void. When that motion was granted, I had the honor of representing the Party in the case.

It is widely assumed that we will lose this case. The Supreme Court has grown more conservative and hostile to such laws since it was last upheld. It had no reason to grant review if its intention was simply to once again reject Republican attacks.

Yet none of that makes this case less important or less worthy of close attention. If the Republican Party gets its way, it will not only expand the arms race of campaign spending — it will deal a severe blow to the core tenets underlying all limits on campaign contributions. The result could be catastrophic.

The second case I was involved in is likely more familiar to you — Watson v. RNC. This case involves a Republican challenge to a state law that permits mail-in ballots mailed prior to Election Day to be counted if they are received a few days afterward.

The dispute is over the scope of the federal law that sets Election Day as the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. The RNC argues that federal election statutes require ballots to be received by that day, while my clients and Mississippi argue that the law requires only that ballots be cast by Election Day.

While this may seem like a minor dispute, the implications are vast. It will determine the future of mail-in voting, and if the Supreme Court sides with the RNC, tens of thousands of voters will be disenfranchised. That is because the RNC argues that mail-in ballots should not be counted if received after Election Day — even if they are postmarked on time.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had hoped to argue this case before the Court. We had intervened to become defendants when the case was first filed. 

Yet, despite being parties to the case, the conservative Supreme Court denied my request. The result was that only the lawyer for Mississippi was left defending a law that will have implications across the nation.

Finally, I will be watching a case I did not litigate — the challenge to Trump’s effort to undo birthright citizenship. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court — even this Court — siding with Trump in this case. The question is whether the outcome will be a total victory and repudiation of Trump’s unorthodox theory, or something more nuanced and measured.

I fear we have a cruel month ahead of us: the future of campaign finance law, the definition of Election Day, the fate of birthright citizenship. While I remain hopeful, I am prepared for democracy to leave this month weaker than it entered. 

And if that is the result, we must be ready to fight back even stronger. Even April, cruel as it is, eventually gives way to summer.

The post For democracy, June is the cruelest month appeared first on Democracy Docket.

Right now, it’s hard to imagine a U.S. election system that genuinely encourages and facilitates everyone’s participation. Yet among other high-income countries, this orientation is commonplace. 

Our team systematically analyzed the laws and constitutional provisions governing access to the vote in all 38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, to assess just how far behind the United States is in realizing the right to vote for all — and what policymakers can do about it.

Our new policy brief, out Tuesday, will distill what we found. But here are some of our key findings, exclusively for Democracy Docket readers:

• The U.S. stands alone among OECD countries in having no nationwide requirements for any of the following pro-voting policies: automatic registration, paid time off to vote, election scheduling on a weekend or public holiday, early in-person voting, standardized poll hours, or widely available postal voting.
• We’re one of just two of the 38 OECD countries to schedule elections on a non-holiday weekday, without providing paid leave for voters.
• Though around half of U.S. states automatically register voters, we’re among the 18% of OECD countries not to do so nationwide.

Overall, our research found that nearly every other wealthy democracy has taken affirmative steps to make voting easy. In the U.S., it all depends on where you live. 

Election scheduling provides one example. Being unable to get off work is one of the most commonly cited barriers to voting in the U.S., especially for lower-wage workers. Two-thirds of OECD countries, by law, schedule their elections for a weekend day or a public holiday. The U.S. is one of just 5 OECD countries to schedule Election Day for a weekday by law. Among the other four — Canada, Israel, Norway and South Korea — three offer paid leave for voting, reducing barriers for the majority of workers.

Automatic registration provides another. Youth, lower-income citizens, and people of color have lower voter registration rates in the US, and practical barriers are a major contributor. Across the OECD, 82% of countries automatically register citizens to vote using existing government records such as civil registries, tax filings or citizenship databases. In the U.S., thanks to the Motor Voter law, roughly half of states have eased the process of voter registration through opt-out systems that use data collected through contact with a government agency, most commonly the DMV. While opt-out approaches have been shown to significantly increase voter registration, impacts vary across states with different policy designs — and half the states have yet to take any approach. 

Still, in some areas, states are on par with the OECD — or even ahead. Nearly every state (with the exception of New Hampshire, Alabama and Mississippi) allows for early in-person voting, as do 61% of OECD countries. All 50 states and Washington, D.C., also permit mail-in voting in at least some circumstances, which aligns with 82% of the OECD. Yet no national law guarantees widespread access to either, and last month’s Executive Order aims to sharply limit the availability of mail-in voting options. Already, 13 states — nearly all in the South — only permit mail-in ballots for voters with a documented excuse, such as a medical emergency. 

Altogether, the U.S. stands alone among OECD countries in having no nationwide protections for automatic registration, paid time off to vote, election scheduling on a weekend or public holiday, early in-person voting, standardized poll hours, or widely available postal voting. These gaps help explain why our voter turnout is so much lower than peer countries and varies so much across states. Indeed, our analysis found that among the OECD countries that have adopted at least two approaches to making it easier for registered voters to vote, turnout in parliamentary elections is substantially higher: 82%, on average, compared to 68% among countries with one or no approaches. 

To be sure, the American system of election administration differs from that of some of our peer countries. The U.S. Constitution largely delegates authority over elections to the states, offering important safeguards against federal overreach in an era of rising authoritarianism. At the same time, Congress has the authority to remove barriers to voting across states — including by making Election Day a public holiday, making mail-in voting universal, and making near-automatic registration a reality nationwide. Indeed, federal bills that would implement each one of these reforms have been introduced within the last five years. 

Making it easier for more eligible voters to participate in elections should not be a partisan issue. A true democracy depends on every citizen having a voice, and nearly all Americans agree that voting is an “essential right.” In the near term, states have the power to reduce needless barriers to voting. In the long term, Congressional action to create more equitable standards for access to the vote across the country is essential to reducing gaps in voter registration and turnout that are tied to where citizens live.

Aleta Sprague is the Cofounder and Principal of Legal Analysis at Equal Futures.

Amy Raub is the Cofounder and Principal of Research at Equal Futures.

Nicholas Perry is the Cofounder and Principal of Partnerships at Equal Futures.

The post Exclusive: New data shows US lags far behind peers on voting access appeared first on Democracy Docket.

In less than a month, Tennessee and Alabama enacted racially gerrymandered maps. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry cancelled an ongoing primary election to dilute the power of Black voters in the state, announcing that votes already cast would be simply “discarded”. South Carolina Republicans tried to follow suit, though for now the effort has failed. 

The damage won’t end here. We will feel the effects of Callais into 2028 and beyond. Because the decision doesn’t just redraw maps, it erases the promise of equal representation. 

In the wake of the court’s disastrous ruling, the door is now wide open for states across the country to enact discriminatory maps with virtual impunity. It was, in the words of NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) president Janai Nelson, “a day of infamy for the court” and “a day of devastation for our democracy.”

To understand the magnitude of this loss, it’s important to understand the function of Section 2 of the VRA. Section 2 was the core protection against racial discrimination in voting, including redistricting. It is the legal tool communities of color have used when states or local governments split minority neighborhoods to minimize the political power of Black people and others. Over four decades, Section 2 resulted in wins in more than 450 federal cases that remedied real, documented harm. And it deterred far more harm than LDF and others ever had to litigate.

The results were tangible. In 1965, fewer than 1,400 Black elected officials held office in the entire country. Within 30 years, that number had grown to 10,000. In Louisiana, every Black member of Congress and every member of the state legislature had been elected from districts created in response to VRA litigation. 

The VRA was not a relic of a distant past. It was the active infrastructure holding the line, cycle after cycle, against legislatures that never stopped looking for ways to dilute Black political power.

And that infrastructure has now been dismantled.

Callais was, from the time reargument was set, a manufactured case. When it was first argued in March 2025, it was a straightforward racial gerrymandering claim, a constitutional question. But when the Justices found the case insufficient to achieve their ideological aims, they did something extraordinary: they ordered reargument and reframed the entire litigation around the constitutionality of Section 2 itself. 

That is not jurisprudence.

The VRA question was never litigated at the district court level. It was raised for the first time in the Appellees’ merits brief on appeal, with no evidentiary record beneath it. Appellate courts exist to review what lower courts decided, not to launch new constitutional inquiries from scratch. You cannot legitimately raise a claim for the first time on appeal. There is no record to examine, no factual foundation to stand on. The Court manufactured the question it wanted to answer, and then answered it.

What makes this even more troubling is that the Supreme Court already had cases pending before it that actually raised the constitutionality of Section 2 — cases that had been properly developed in district courts, with full evidentiary records built for exactly that purpose. The Court set those aside. Callais, with its thin record and procedural shortcuts, was simply more malleable. It was easier to contrive.

This is how the Voting Rights Act died: not in a fair fight, but in a case engineered to produce a predetermined result. 

The majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito is contrivance and camouflage. He did not claim to be overturning Section 2. He claimed to be merely “updating” the framework laid out in the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles case. This is a fig leaf, a flimsy cover for avoiding the headlines that lay bare what the Court is actually doing.

What the Court did was resurrect the very intent test that Congress explicitly rejected when it amended the VRA in 1982. That amendment was a hard-won triumph, enacted in direct response to the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Mobile v. Bolden, which had required proof of intentional discrimination as part of the analysis. Congress understood 40 years ago what remains true today: that intent is easy to disguise and nearly impossible to prove. The effects test closed that loophole.

And the Court just reopened it, while pretending they haven’t.

The consequences are not abstract. At least 40 House districts stretching from Louisiana to North Carolina are now at risk of elimination, districts currently represented by Black congressmembers that were protected under Section 2. Before this ruling, there were 63 majority-Black House members, representing roughly 14% of the House. Losing even a handful could mark the largest single-session drop in Black congressional representation since the end of Reconstruction. This number does not even cover the massive amount of state and local positions that will be affected.

And just this month, the Supreme Court vacated its opinion in Allen v. Milligan, returning the case — which had found Alabama’s 2023 redistricting plan intentionally discriminatory — to the district court. That court found this week that Alabama was still barred from using its racially discriminatory map, because intentional racial discrimination remains unconstitutional. Alabama has appealed back to SCOTUS — and a ruling greenlighting the map would confirm that, after Callais, the court is unwilling to enforce even the absolute minimum standard of protections for Black voters.

We cannot say we were not warned. We cannot say we did not know what was being built, case by case, year after year, in the marble halls of First Street. We watched Shelby County strip the preclearance shield — the most effective plank of the VRA — back in 2013. We watched Rucho give cover to partisan gerrymanderers six years later. We watched Brnovich close the courthouse door on voting access cases in 2021. And now, with Callais, we have seen the final shoe drop.

Section 2 of the VRA was born of the blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. It was the codified memory of Selma, of literacy tests and poll taxes, of state police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Its gutting deserves not just our grief, but our fury and our action.

The Court has declared, in the plainest possible terms, that the promise of a multiracial democracy is ours to fight for. It is ours to win.

Sara Rohani is Assistant Counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, where she litigates voting rights cases nationwide at the trial and appellate levels, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. She has been counsel in the redistricting litigation against Louisiana’s racially discriminatory congressional map since 2022.

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A federal court has again blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map, ruling that the map was tainted by intentional race-based discrimination and that the state must continue using the court-ordered map already used during the 2024 election cycle, which also resulted in the election of Rep. Shomari Figures in the new congressional District 2. 

But the issue is not settled. Alabama has asked the Supreme Court to block the federal court’s ruling, which would allow them to eliminate the second majority-Black district in the state. Alabama’s decision to appeal makes clear, if it wasn’t already, that the state’s leaders believe there should be no meaningful curbs on their ability to eviscerate Black political power. The district court did not simply say Alabama got the lines wrong. It said Alabama’s legislature intentionally discriminated against Black voters, violated the 14th Amendment, and likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act even under the newer, harder standard shaped by Louisiana v. Callais.

That should stop all of us in our tracks.

Because this is not a story about a technical map dispute. This is a story about a state being told by federal courts, more than once, that its congressional map unlawfully diluted Black voting power, on purpose, then choosing to resist, rework, relitigate and return to the same pattern of disenfranchisement. The courts ruled. Alabama refused to accept the loss. The courts ruled again. And again the state refused to accept it. 

That is the real story. And that is exactly why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still matters.

While the bar for Section 2 claims is much higher post-Callais, it is one of the remaining tools communities have to challenge voting practices that deny people of color an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. It does not give Black voters special treatment. It simply says states cannot design election systems that weaken the voting strength of communities because of race. A voting system built on racial inequality does not suddenly become equal just because the country starts reframing the inequality it was built on. In Alabama, the Section 2 claim was successful because of the state’s disastrous record on racial discrimination. Clearly, Section 2 is still doing the work certain elected officials keep pretending this country no longer needs.

The court record makes plain that Black Alabamians are a large and geographically compact community, that voting in Alabama remains deeply racially polarized, and that Black voters have less opportunity than other voters to elect candidates of their choice. The 2025 ruling called the Section 2 claims “not a close call” and found that Alabama’s 2023 plan unlawfully diluted Black voting strength.

If a case this clear can still be dragged through years of delay, defiance and legal maneuvering, what happens when the facts are less visible? What happens when discriminatory intent is buried under softer language? What happens when the public is too exhausted or misinformed to follow the thread? Modern voter suppression does not always announce itself with poll taxes and literacy tests. Sometimes it shows up as district lines and appears as “race-neutral” language that produces racially unequal outcomes. 

That is why this moment is bigger than Alabama.

We are watching a full-scale attempt to roll back the Reconstruction Amendments and the civil rights gains of the Second Reconstruction. The 14th Amendment promised equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment prohibited racial discrimination in voting. The Voting Rights Act gave those promises enforcement power after states spent nearly a century finding ways to evade them.

Alabama knows this history because Alabama helped write this history. Selma is not a symbol because the nation loves commemoration. Selma is a symbol because the fight for Black voting power has always exposed the gap between America’s democratic language and its governing reality.

That is still the question.

Can a state lose under the Voting Rights Act, lose at the Supreme Court, draw another discriminatory map, get called out for violating the 14th Amendment, and still expect the public to treat this as ordinary politics? Can democracy survive if those in power can simply keep changing the rules until the people they want silenced are functionally erased?

We need to be honest about what is being tested. This is not only a test of Alabama’s maps. It is a test of whether constitutional rights mean anything when a state has the political will to defy them. It is a test of whether the Voting Rights Act still has force after years of being weakened.

It is time for people to not only wake up to what is happening, but to recognize that none of us can afford to stay politically asleep. This should concern non-Black voters, too. Black political power has historically expanded democracy for everyone. When Black communities fought for the ballot, they expanded the meaning of citizenship, representation and equal protection. Attacks on Black voting power are often the testing ground for broader attacks on democracy.

This week’s ruling made something else unmistakably clear. The court warned that Alabama’s repeated conduct raised serious constitutional concerns beyond a single election cycle. The judges pointed directly to the Legislature’s continued use of race in drawing maps after already being told the prior map violated federal law. In doing so, the court reinforced that this was not an innocent disagreement over line drawing or political philosophy. It was a state repeatedly testing how far it could go in weakening Black political power while still surviving judicial review.

The ruling also underscored something civil rights advocates have warned for years. Alabama was not simply responding to court orders in good faith. It was repeatedly attempting to preserve the same political outcomes while appearing legally compliant on the surface.

Yes, the court blocked the map. But the deeper struggle remains.

Because the question before us is not simply whether Alabama will use a fair map. The question is whether we are willing to see this moment for what it truly is, an ongoing fight over whether Black voters will be treated as full constitutional citizens or managed as a political problem to be contained.

That is not just a map fight. That is a democracy fight.

Anneshia Hardy serves as the Executive Director of Alabama Values and Alabama Values Progress, where she leads narrative strategy, messaging, and public engagement initiatives focused on voting rights, civic participation, and democratic power-building across the American South.

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It won’t be the first time Southern legislatures have done this. For decades after 1965, racist lawmakers continued to manipulate congressional districts to silence Black voters. When the U.S. Supreme Court failed to stop them, Congress enacted the provision of the VRA that the Court just destroyed. 

Voters today must demand representatives who will once again restore voting rights and rein in an antidemocratic Court. The Callais ruling has taken the country at least as far back as the pre-1982 version of the VRA, before Congress responded to Southern defiance by strengthening the civil rights law. And history shows that it will once again take congressional action to truly ensure fair elections in the South.

Southern states responded to the VRA with “massive resistance,” which included voter suppression and new congressional maps that carved up

majority-Black communities. Mississippi actually had a majority-Black congressional district before the VRA was enacted, though the state had successfully kept Black people from registering to vote. As Black voter registration shot up, the state split up the majority-Black district and combined it with majority-white counties in the eastern part of the state.

These districts disenfranchised Black voters in Mississippi for more than a decade. And geographically speaking, those districts are probably not that different from what Republicans today have in mind. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves recently vowed that a long-serving Black representative’s “reign of terror” was over. He said they would carve up the district after the midterm elections. 

Last time this happened, it took an 18-year-long legal battle and amendments to the VRA to actually force Southern states to draw the majority-Black districts that Republicans are eliminating. In the 1980 Mobile v. Borden case, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Fifth Circuit ruling that elections for the Mobile City Commission violated the VRA. The justices ruled that voters had to prove intentional discrimination, not just a discriminatory impact, in VRA cases. 

Congress jumped into action and overturned this decision with the 1982 amendments to the VRA, which explicitly banned election rules and districts that impact voters of color more than others. 

It took years of litigation to actually get some Southern states to comply with the 1982 amendments. But by the time districts were redrawn after the 1990 Census, states couldn’t get around the VRA. They finally had to comply. 

North Carolina had its first congressional election with a majority-Black district in 1992, but the Black population was later reduced, as voting became less racially polarized. Last year, Republicans carved up this district, reportedly at the behest of Trump, and left it with a Black voting-age population of less than one-third. 

Throughout the 1970s, the percentage of non-white members of Congress remained in the low single digits. That may be where we’re headed again, as Southern legislatures gerrymander the region where most of the country’s Black population lives. 

Activists and Democratic lawmakers across the country are trying to fight back. Blue states could respond with their own new maps to counter the GOP’s gerrymandering. 

But there’s also a path to fair congressional districts before the 2030 Census requires new districts. This path runs through Congress and state courts. Voters can push for more civil rights lawyers to be elected or appointed to state courts, which have the power to fight the disenfranchisement that the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican legislators have unleashed. In North Carolina, Justices Anita Earls and Allison Riggs had both successfully defeated politicians in gerrymandering cases before they reached the bench. 

Voters can also elect a president and members of Congress willing to rein in an out-of-control and antidemocratic U.S. Supreme Court. Congress has the power to enact a new VRA, and it can use its authority to define the Court’s jurisdiction to keep the justices from undermining the rights of Black voters. 

In 1982, Congress thought that changing the VRA was enough. But it wasn’t enough for this Court, under the leadership of a longtime VRA opponent. That’s why Congress has to pass a new VRA and strip the justices of any power over it. 

Billy Corriher is the state courts manager for People’s Parity Project Action and the author of Justice for the People: The Anita Earls Story. As a Democracy Docket contributor, Billy writes about voting and election state court cases in North Carolina and across the country. 

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The reaction has been swift and understandable. Outrage. Condemnation. Calls to fight back.

The calls are right, but they are not enough. Because the deeper lesson of Callais is not just that we must fight back. It’s that the people who actually live in these states have been fighting all along and all alone. Support for them today comes in far too little and decades too late.

Black voters in Louisiana didn’t need this ruling to tell them what was at stake. Voting rights organizers across the South didn’t need a Supreme Court opinion to know what was being built against them. They have been sounding the alarm and doing the work to protect their hard-won progress for years. What failed them wasn’t effort. It was a national political world that decided these places weren’t worth sustained investment.  

As someone who spent eight years in Congress — and many more among influential Democratic, progressive and social justice-oriented national circles — I am intimately familiar with this landscape. The political target lists that light up the East and West but ignore the South and almost everything in between. The oft-traveled flights to the same old battleground fights.. The addiction to boom and bust spending; if money comes in, it’s late and ineffective. 

That is the failure Callais should force us, myself included, to reckon with.

Because this ruling didn’t come out of nowhere. It was built on decades of uncontested Republican dominance at the state level — the kind of durable political infrastructure that, over time, gives you the legislature, the map, the governor’s mansion, the court, the case. 

Shelby County v. Holder, out of Alabama in 2013, which gutted the preclearance protections that had guarded against exactly this kind of voter suppression for nearly 50 years. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, decided out of Mississippi in 2022, which overturned 50 years of federal precedent because one side spent decades building power in the states, while too many on our side focused almost exclusively on federal elections and federal courts.

The examples are endless, the pattern consistent, and the lesson the same: ceding state terrain is how you eventually lose federal terrain, too. It isn’t a coincidence, it is a strategy. Their well-funded, long-term strategy. And for too long, we didn’t have one to match it.

Americans for Prosperity and its affiliated Koch network have chapter operations in 35 states, built over decades with investment that dwarfs anything the pro-democracy movement has put into comparable terrain — more than half a billion dollars from a single funding source into AFP alone between 2013 and 2023. 

We will not outspend them overnight. But we can — and must — stop ceding the field.

That means making a long-term commitment to year-round community organizing in overlooked states: not parachuting in during election season and leaving. Instead, building the kind of sustained, locally-rooted infrastructure that earns trust over years and creates the conditions for civic participation to take root. 

It means investing in the people and groups who are already there — because they have always been there, doing this work without support; not just organizing but taking care of each other in the face of the care their country has withdrawn or denied. 

And it means accepting that this is not a two-year project or a four-year project. The other side has been at this for forty years. We don’t win by matching their last sprint. We win by finally committing to the marathon.

The hard truth that Callais demands we face extends beyond Louisiana — though what is happening to Black voters in the South is the most egregious and urgent expression of it. But all across this country, working people have faced their own version of governance without accountability: state legislatures that override what their own constituents vote for, basic services stripped, with no organized opposition to push back. The consequences fall hardest on Black communities in the South, as all of our country’s ugliest oppressions and injustices do. But no one is left untouched when we stop competing.

Callais is a gut punch. It is also a clarifying moment. The question is not whether we should fight — of course we should. The question is whether we will finally fight where the battle actually is: in the state legislatures, at the local organizing tables, within the communities that have been asking for this investment for a generation and doing the work in the meantime without it.

The organizers I work with in states like Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia and Oklahoma didn’t need this ruling to tell them the stakes. They’ve known. The question has always been whether the rest of us were paying attention.

Joe Kennedy III is a former U.S. Representative from Massachusetts and the founder of Groundwork Project, which supports year-round community organizing in overlooked states.

The post To protect voting rights after Callais, we need to invest in red states appeared first on Democracy Docket.

Acting on an emergency petition by Alabama, the Court vacated an injunction against a congressional map that had been found to violate the Constitution. It did so on the shadow docket, without full briefing or oral argument — the same procedural shortcut the Court has increasingly used to put its thumb on the scale against voting rights.

This was not the inevitable result of the Callais case, nor was it preordained by some newly developed legal doctrine. The decision ultimately required the Court to ignore the constitutional rights of Black voters — and to apply a blatant double standard about when, and for whom, courts may alter congressional maps close to an election.

The facts speak for themselves.

In February 2022, when Black voters in Alabama faced an unconstitutional map that denied them two congressional districts, the Supreme Court said it was too close to the May primary to provide relief. Yet last week, when Alabama asked the Court to eliminate one of those same districts, the Court approved the request — with the primary election only 10 days away.

The Court took similar action in Callais, expediting the effect of its ruling to allow Louisiana to cancel an ongoing congressional election. As a result, the state was able to redraw its maps to remedy what the Court found were violations of white voters’ constitutional rights. 

Together, these decisions reveal the same pattern: urgency for white voters, delay for Black voters.

At the heart of these cases is the Purcell principle — the idea that courts should avoid changing voting or election rules too close to an election. It is a doctrine with no grounding in law or the Constitution, and one that conservatives on the Supreme Court have wielded all too often to advantage white voters and Republicans at the expense of Black voters and Democrats.

To be honest, the Purcell principle never made sense. It lacks clear standards, consistent application, and constitutional foundation.

In its original form, it was aimed at preventing court orders that “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” But it rapidly expanded into something far broader: a tool to block any court order that might protect voting rights near an election, while allowing anti-voting measures to proceed unchallenged.

Consider what the Court did during the 2020 presidential primaries. As the attorney for the Democratic National Committee, I sought to expand voting by mail in Wisconsin, while the Republican National Committee fought to limit it — at the height of a deadly pandemic, without a reliable test, treatment or vaccine.

After we won a hard-fought case, the Supreme Court deployed Purcell to reverse it, writing that courts “should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

I was struck at the time by the word “ordinarily.” If there was ever an extraordinary circumstance, it was a statewide election held in April 2020 while COVID was raging.

But I also noticed something else: the Court specified this was only a limitation on lower federal courts. That made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. If last-minute changes to election rules harm voters and election officials, the injury is no lesser when the order comes from the Supreme Court itself.

The Court was quietly carving out a permission structure for itself — one it has since used aggressively.

In the 2022 Alabama redistricting case, the plaintiffs believed they were clear of any Purcell concern. Unlike in Wisconsin, the case was not decided on the eve of an election. By the time the unconstitutional map was enjoined, Election Day was still nearly four months away. The primary had barely begun.

Yet the Supreme Court blocked the Black voters’ victory anyway. Writing for three justices, Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that “when an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” and that “late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences.”

Then, in December 2025, the Court blocked another victory, striking down Texas’s new congressional map, in part because the district court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign.” At the time, the Texas congressional primary was still three months away.

The pattern is unmistakable. In case after case, the window in which courts may act to protect Democrats and Black voters has been shrunk to nearly nothing. Meanwhile, the Court has moved with urgency to protect maps that favor white voters and Republican candidates, even when doing so required acting closer to an election than it had previously deemed acceptable.

It is impossible to view this honestly without concluding that the Court has not been applying a neutral principle. It has been choosing sides.

The Purcell principle was always a legal fiction applied selectively. But we are now beyond mere inconsistency. The Court has used the Purcell principle to erode any trust that there is any principle at all

I realize that few lawyers want to name what is happening as bluntly as I have. They fear blowback or disapproval from other lawyers and the legal establishment.

But ignoring reality doesn’t make the problem disappear. The Supreme Court has decided, case by case, that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal political power does not apply equally to everyone. That is a crisis for the court and our democracy.

The Purcell principle didn’t create this crisis. The Supreme Court did — and Purcell has become its weapon of choice. 

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On April 29, the Supreme Court did not simply reinterpret that jewel. It desecrated it. And in doing so, it handed something far more dangerous to state legislatures across this country: permission. Permission to redraw lines with surgical precision. Permission to dilute voices without saying so aloud. Permission to cloak racial disenfranchisement in the language of procedure. This is how erosion happens in America. Not always with a bang, but with a ruling from six unelected judges and a shrug. 

We have seen this before. We are told that this is progress. That the country has moved beyond its past, that we now live in a “colorblind” society. But if that were true, there would be no need to dismantle the protections that guard against it. Laws do not get stripped away in a vacuum. They are removed because they are in the way of something. 

And what they are is in the way of those who are in power and wish to wield it indiscriminately. 

The story of civil rights in this country is not abstract; it’s living and breathing. It is written in the lives of people who paid for the right to vote with their bodies. Activists beaten in Selma on Bloody Sunday. Freedom Summer volunteers murdered in Mississippi while registering people to vote. People who never saw the fruits of the freedoms they demanded. And the people today still living with the physical and mental scars earned fighting for freedom. 

To weaken the Voting Rights Act is not just a legal act. It is a moral statement. It suggests that the sacrifices made were excessive. That the protections earned are now inconvenient. That the bloodshed can be discounted because it belongs to another era. But the past is not the past. It’s the present.

Issues that were thought to be fully settled are now erased. You see it in the steady dismantling of women’s rights. You see it in the coordinated attacks on diversity and inclusion efforts, where attempts to correct a historic imbalance are recast as threats. You see it in the growing hostility toward immigrants. Rights that once felt stable now feel conditional. 

There is a pattern here. The Court’s action to dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, wasn’t in isolation. It is part of a broader recalibration of rights in this country, one that places more discretion in the hands of those already in power and less protection in the hands of those who have historically been denied it. 

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is not just the policy shifts, but the posture behind them. The casualness with which they are carried out. The sense that history can be brushed aside, that the struggles of prior generations are relics rather than warnings. The distance between then and now is not as wide as we pretend. 

The images may look different. The language may be more polished. But the underlying questions remain the same: Who gets power? Who gets heard? Who gets to shape the future of this country? 

Opponents of the VRA will say that our country is different and that we’ve moved past the need for it, but snuffing out Black representation where the majority of Black Americans live isn’t progress. It’s regression with better branding. The question now is not whether this moment matters. It does. The question is whether we will recognize it clearly enough to respond with the same conviction as those who came before us. They understood something that we are in danger of forgetting. 

While last week’s decision was a blow to fighters for a more just nation, the moral arc of the universe still bends towards justice. Our battle for a nation that represents “we the people” in its truest sense is not closed and will never be closed. Which is why the hollowing out of Section 2 is not an endpoint but a rally cry to continue the work of our forefathers who strove to create an America where all people reach the mountaintop.

Christopher Ford is a political strategist, community organizer, and systems-level advocate based in Metro Detroit, with experience spanning government, party leadership, and grassroots movements.

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The Republican Party has become a collection of arsonists targeting every part of civil society, liberalism and democracy. One faction aims at crushing the rights of individual citizens — shooting them in the streets of Minneapolis. Another works to co-opt large institutions — corporations, law firms and legacy media.

What unites them all, however, is corrupting the electoral process. Regardless of faction, suppressing voting rights and subverting election results is the responsibility of every member of the MAGA coalition.

All right-wing authoritarian movements need their false history — narratives that help them justify their actions. But there is something unique about how this happens in the United States.

We are a nation of laws, and the courts play an outsized role in our culture. Miranda warnings — including the right to remain silent — have as much cultural importance as they do legal.

Supreme Court cases don’t simply resolve disputes between the parties before them. They do more than set precedent for other courts resolving similar claims. Major cases define the acceptable scope of policy debate and signal what is right and wrong.

These cases become cultural drivers well beyond the courtroom.

Supporters of the defeated Confederacy embraced the myth of the Lost Cause, but without Plessy v. Ferguson, the South would not have had the legal or moral authority to impose Jim Crow.

When a violent mob ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Trump was initially seen as a disgraced figure. It was the Supreme Court’s immunity decision that permitted him both to escape legal accountability and to be recast in right-wing culture as a victim.

We are now witnessing the latest instance of a Supreme Court decision creating a legal and cultural permission structure to attack democracy.

The day after Louisiana v. Callais was released, Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking them to identify and challenge Voting Rights Act districts nationwide. Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees civil rights at the DOJ, responded on social media, “Senator — we are ON IT.”

The speed of that response explains exactly what the Court had just set in motion. But Schmitt’s letter revealed something more.

In a telling sign of his true motive, Schmitt singled out California — a state whose congressional map was driven by partisan, not racial, considerations. These aren’t VRA districts, but that doesn’t matter to Schmitt.

For Republicans, “VRA districts” is an excuse to investigate places where minority voters live and exercise political power.

And, as you can imagine, following Callais, we are watching a GOP frenzy to strip Black voters of their political power. In state after state, Republicans are declaring all seats held by Black Democrats unconstitutional. Any district where Black voters have been able to elect their candidate of choice is being targeted with a gleeful vengeance reminiscent of the mob on Jan. 6.

We are already seeing worrying signs that the culture is adopting this framing. Over the last few days, reporters and pundits have adopted a shorthand: If a district has a significant number of Black voters and has elected a Black member, it must be a VRA district and thus a legitimate target for erasure.

This is how the Supreme Court creates a culture of anti-voting.

In his majority opinion, Justice Alito went to great pains to say that the Court was affirming the constitutionality of the VRA and declaring for the first time that race may, in some circumstances, be used to draw congressional districts. Yet these words were drowned out by the dog whistle message that the Court was approving the aggressive dismantling of a multiracial democracy.

That is what Schmitt heard. It is what the DOJ heard. It is what Republican legislators around the country heard.

Despite notable setbacks, the pro-democracy movement continues to rack up key court wins, and Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to sink. But we make a mistake in thinking the GOP will be satisfied simply with targeting minorities. They are happy to see democracy burn to the ground. They are in the thrall of a man who wants to be a dictator.

What has me worried — what we all need to focus on — is that something important in our democracy broke last week, and we are only beginning to see the fallout. The winners will be a Republican Party that is hostile to democracy.

The immediate losers will be minority voters who are already facing a barrage of efforts to disenfranchise them. But in the long run, all of us who want a representative democracy and free and fair elections will lose out.

That is why we must fight back.

The Roberts Court did not invent the GOP’s war on multiracial democracy. But it keeps issuing the permits.

That is the lesson of Plessy. That is the lesson of the immunity decision. And that is the lesson of Callais.

Lawyers and commentators need to recognize that in Court opinions, the dog whistle is too often louder than the fine print. The culture moves before the next set of lawsuits can even be filed.

We are in that critical window right now. Republican legislators are already redrawing maps. In some cases, they’re redrawing maps mid-election. The DOJ has already signaled it will help them. And, most importantly, the media is already starting to use the GOP’s framing.

Stopping this assault on democracy is not primarily a legal task, though the legal fights can matter enormously. It is a cultural one.

The fire is not coming; it’s burning hot, and the GOP is fanning its flames. The question is whether enough of us are willing to stand up for free and fair elections — plainly, loudly and without qualification — before the permission structure of Callais hardens into culture, and the culture decides this is simply how things are.

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In late 2021 and early 2022, my law firm successfully sued both states for failing to create a second district in which Black voters could elect their candidate of choice.

But there is another aspect of these cases that should be raising alarms. You have no doubt heard the term shadow docket — or “interim docket” as conservatives call it. This is the mechanism the Court is supposed to use to handle emergencies that it cannot avoid.

The shadow docket has grown in scope and importance in a range of areas of the law. But none has been as important or as overlooked as the area of redistricting.

My law firm had sued Alabama over its illegal map in November 2021. Within a few months, we had secured a victory for our clients and the Black voters of Alabama. Unsurprisingly, Alabama went to the Supreme Court to block our victory in the 2022 election.

On Feb. 7, 2022, the Court put our victory on hold. According to Justices Kavanaugh and Alito, the emergency stay was necessary because of the “chaos” a new map would create for the upcoming primary elections. Those elections were still four and a half months away.

In June 2022, we won a similar victory for our clients and Black voters in Louisiana. As in Alabama, the result was that the state would be forced to have two Black opportunity districts for the first time.

Unlike Alabama, the primary was not until November. At the time, Louisiana had an unusual primary system where congressional primaries were held on what is elsewhere general election day.

Just as in the earlier case, Louisiana went to the Supreme Court for an emergency stay — claiming that “the sand in [the] electoral hourglass is rapidly sifting” for an election that was still more than four months away.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with the state and blocked our victory.

The practical reality was grim. Despite two court decisions in their favor, Black voters in Alabama and Louisiana were denied their federal voting rights in elections held that fall.

Eventually, we won both cases, and in 2024, both states had two minority opportunity districts, and Black voters elected their preferred candidates in each of them.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court used a follow-on case in Louisiana to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the very provision we had relied upon to secure our earlier victories.

The ink on that decision was barely dry before both states moved to capitalize on it. Republicans in both states have moved swiftly to redraw their maps to eliminate majority-Black districts — despite elections being only days away.

In Louisiana, where mail-in voting has begun, Gov. Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to suspend those elections. In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey has called a special session of the legislature to change its maps. Voting there begins in little more than two weeks.

This weekend, litigants in both states are awaiting Supreme Court rulings about whether its own precedents demand or permit this result. This is no small matter.

At stake is not just the fate of the maps for 2026 in these two states.

The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy. Having used the shadow docket to halt maps favorable to minority voters because elections were approaching, it would be indefensible for the Court to refuse to apply the same standard now — when voting has already begun in Louisiana and is days away in Alabama.

But, perhaps, that is why — over the objection of conservatives — the term shadow docket has stuck. It allows the Court to act without the accountability that sunlight provides. It allows democracy and equal treatment under the law to be sacrificed without the public scrutiny such actions deserve.

For now, I will hope and insist the Court does the right thing — even after it did the wrong thing last week. That may seem naïve or unrealistic. But I refuse to allow cynicism and low expectations to excuse the abuse of the justice system at the expense of minority voters and voting rights.

If the conservative justices dispense with the same standard they previously used to deny minority voters lawful maps, I have no intention of letting them act in the shadows and having this pass. I will do whatever I can to insist that such action be broadcast in the bright light of day for all to see.

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