DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston filed the lawsuit Wednesday in Fulton County challenging House Bill 369 (HB 369), which Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed into law last month. The law would make several county-level offices — including district attorney — nonpartisan beginning in 2028, but only in Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties.

Those five metro Atlanta counties are among the state’s most populous and Democratic-leaning. They also have large Black populations and all have Black women serving as district attorney — a fact the lawsuit and voting rights advocates have pointed to as central to the law’s impact.

The challenge marks the opening of a major legal fight over whether Georgia Republicans can selectively remove party labels from local races in the very counties where Democratic candidates have built power. In practical terms, nonpartisan elections mean voters would no longer see whether candidates for certain local offices are running as Democrats, Republicans or members of another party.

Boston argues the law is not a neutral change, but a targeted political maneuver by the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly to obscure party affiliation in counties where Democrats currently hold most elected offices.

The lawsuit challenges HB 369 on three grounds. 

First, Boston argues the law violates Georgia’s Uniformity Clause, a state constitutional rule requiring laws to operate the same way across Georgia rather than changing the rules for only one area. Second, the lawsuit argues the law violates equal protection guarantees in the Georgia and U.S. constitutions, which require the government to treat people equally under the law. Third, the lawsuit claims lawmakers violated Georgia’s Rejected Bills Clause by reviving the same proposal after it failed in the Senate without taking the required two-thirds vote.

Voting rights advocates warned even before the lawsuit was filed that the law would weaken voters’ ability to make informed choices in some of Georgia’s most diverse Democratic strongholds.

“HB 369 is akin to political redlining,” Joel Alvarados, Partnership for Southern Equity vice president for strategy and engagement, said at a rally in April. “The same logic applies to this legislation. They are trying to tell the state that these five counties have problems. This is a way to dilute the political power in those counties.”

Meanwhile, Nichola Hines, president of the League of Women Voters Georgia, said that HB 369 “is not about improving democracy. It’s about changing the rules for five counties.”

Boston and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis previously signaled they would sue after Kemp signed the measure, saying the law was designed to give Republicans an advantage in Democratic counties.

“House Bill 369 is clearly unconstitutional, and we are appalled at Governor Brian Kemp’s decision to sign it into law,” the attorneys said in a joint statement. “This is a blatant attempt by Republicans to give their candidates an edge in Democratic counties by hiding their party affiliations from voters.”

The post Georgia law targeting Democratic counties draws lawsuit over ‘political redlining’ appeared first on Democracy Docket.

“In California, 40%-50% of the vote is counted after election night,” conservative influencer Benny Johnson wrote on social media Tuesday. “How can voters have faith in the outcome of elections that they don’t know the results of for weeks. There’s so much opportunity for fraud.”

Under California’s jungle primary system, the top two vote-getters of any party advance to November’s general election. Because of the widespread use of mail-in voting in California — ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to seven days later are counted — it can take days or weeks for close races to be called in the Golden State. By Wednesday morning, roughly 60% of the ballots had been counted in California’s heated gubernatorial election — and the vote tally was too close to call to see which two candidates would advance.

Before polls closed Tuesday, election analyst Nate Cohn criticized California’s prolonged process for counting votes.

“The fact that California elections often can’t be resolved for weeks is kind of insane and not common in other electoral systems around the world,” Cohn wrote. “The fact that it’s tolerated is bad too a textbook example of learned helplessness.”

Election deniers and anti-voting activists immediately jumped on Cohn’s comment to baselessly tick off familiar conspiracy theories to explain why California takes longer to count votes. 

“Its because its rigged,” wrote far-right podcaster Tim Pool.

“California has some of the most corrupt elections in the world: No Voter ID,” wrote Rogan O’Handley, a popular conservative commentator. “Sanctuary cities filled with millions of illegal aliens. Print-at-home ballots. Ballot mules going door to door. Weeks to count. Even lefties are starting to acknowledge how terrible they are.”

“Every single watchdog organization calls delayed reporting of results textbook election fraud,” Seth Keshel, a prominent anti-voting activist, said. “We’ve been shouting this for six years and it’s the most obvious thing in the history of civilized society.”

Despite what the far-right is saying, there’s been no evidence whatsoever of election fraud in California’s elections. And the delay in counting votes is consistent with the state’s past reporting timeline in previous elections, according to Stephen Richer, a former Republican Maricopa County Recorder and Cato Institute scholar.

“This is consistent with the state’s past reporting time period,” Richer said on social media. “And it will be the same in November. So don’t freak. Don’t claim fraud.”

The post Election deniers spread lies about California’s slow vote counting: ‘Textbook election fraud’ appeared first on Democracy Docket.

Democrats and civil-rights advocates are speaking out after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority delivered a final blow to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) Tuesday when it allowed Alabama to use a congressional map previously found to have intentionally discriminated against Black voters.

The historic ruling effectively gives states free rein to discriminate and leaves virtually no federal protections for non-white voters, even in extreme cases. Lawmakers can now intentionally eliminate minority political representation.

Critics — including the three liberal Supreme Court justices in a fiery dissent — aren’t mincing words about how harmful the ruling is.

“The Supreme Court has now confirmed that there is no longer a Voting Rights Act in America, and states are essentially free to discriminate against minority voters with no consequences,” Rep. Shomari Figures, the Alabama Democrat whose district the ruling directly targets, said in a statement. “This is a dangerous ruling that sets the State and this nation back decades.”

“Now we know: Today is the day the SCOTUS took the remaining life out of the VRA,” Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington, D.C., office, said in a statement. “Despite the clearest evidence of intentional race discrimination by [Alabama] — that two conservative justices credited, the Court now rewards a state that openly defied a court order. Cold work.”

Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, blasted the Supreme Court majority for stripping Black voters of political power “at a speed that would put Jim Crow jurists to shame.” 

Deuel Ross, director of litigation at the Legal Defense Fund, described the nation’s new legal reality in clear, bleak terms: “The Supreme Court’s decision gives cover to Alabama and others to deliberately and openly discriminate against Black voters without fear of any consequence. The Court’s shameless decision to reinstate a racially discriminatory map defies any thoughtful or consistent application of the law.” 

“Tonight, Alabama has officially rejoined the old Confederacy,” said Doug Jones, a former Alabama Democratic senator who is currently running for governor. 

In a video posted on social media, he said the Supreme Court had acted in “an incredibly malignant way” and delivered an “absolutely outrageous” ruling without any legal reasoning aside from their own partisan preferences.

Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), who represents Alabama’s remaining Black-majority district, condemned the court for “allowing Alabama Republicans to change the rules in the eleventh hour and use a racist congressional map that federal courts have found — on two separate occasions — intentionally discriminates against Black Alabama voters.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) blasted Alabama Republicans for rushing to enact a racist map in an election where absentee voting had already begun.

“As soon as Section 2 of the VRA was eviscerated, they’ve leapt into action to try to remove Black elected officials, not by defeating them at the polls, but by manipulating maps to dilute minority power,” Ossoff said during a TV appearance.

For his part, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) made his own plea to voters: “WAKE UP, AMERICA.”

“The Supreme Court majority just admitted it’s a PARTISAN operator willing to TORCH the rule of law to advance its ideological agenda,” Newsom said through a statement on his press office account. “In an unprecedented move with a brief UNSIGNED order, it: 1) IGNORED the central basis of the lower court’s decision, 2) DISREGARDED its own precedent (that it had assured just weeks ago remained good law), and 3) REWARDED Alabama’s defiance of a federal court order.” 

The ruling appears to be further igniting calls from Democrats to seriously consider major reforms to the Supreme Court. 

“The greatest threat to American democracy may no longer be found in Congress or the White House. It may be found across the street,” Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “The Roberts Court has become an unelected super legislature, rewriting decades of settled law, weakening voting rights, stripping away freedoms, and shielding the powerful from accountability.…Every federal candidate should run on reforming this Court.”

The post Supreme Court lets states ‘openly discriminate against Black voters,’ Democrats, voting advocates say appeared first on Democracy Docket.

The unsigned emergency order in Allen v. Milligan goes beyond the court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, which merely nullified the Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) prohibition on unintentional racial discrimination, to also make it all but impossible for judges to strike down a map as intentionally discriminatory. 

It does so by essentially flipping its own 2023 ruling in the same case. 

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated that decision to go down the “path” that “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law, leading to “a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

Sotomayor noted that Tuesday’s decision was the third time Alabama’s congressional map had found its way before the high bench, lamenting that “[e]ach turn reveals just how unconscionable the Court’s action is today.”

It was the Supreme Court’s surprising decision to uphold Section 2 of the VRA in Milligan just three years ago that gave civil rights groups and voting advocates some glimmer of hope that it might truly preserve the law again in Callais.

Immediately after Callais came out in late April, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to vacate the lower court’s injunction blocking it from using the congressional map it enacted in 2023 — the map the Supreme Court ultimately rejected in Milligan as VRA violation.

The court granted that wish and remanded the case down to the district court, which then entered another injunction, saying the map was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” 

But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court vacated again, saying the lower court failed to “heed the presumption of legislative good faith… because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus.”

The Supreme Court explained that the plaintiffs failed to show that their alternative map performed “‘just as well’ with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible redistricting criteria,” as required by Callais. 

“Yet, the District Court found a violation even though the plaintiffs’ alternative map would not perform just as well as to the State’s constitutionally permissible criteria of keeping together the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding the pairing of incumbents,” the majority held.

But, as the Guardian’s Sam Levine noted on social media Tuesday night, the court came to the exact opposite conclusion in the very same dispute just three years ago.

“Alabama argues that the Gulf Coast region in the southwest of the State is such a community of interest, and that plaintiffs’ maps erred by separating it into two different districts,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority in 2023. “We do not find the State’s argument persuasive.”

That inconsistency belies Justice Samuel Alito’s claim in Callais that the Court was not striking down Section 2 of the VRA, but instead merely “properly constru[ing]” it, as UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen noted. 

“[T]here’s now practically an unrebuttable presumption that a legislature is acting in good faith and therefore is not acting in a racially discriminatory way so long as the state can assert some pretextual nonracial reason for enacting its plan,” Hasen wrote after the decision’s publication. “So in these cases, plaintiffs will need to meet an impossible standard to prove effect, just as in a post-Callais Section 2 case, a standard which simply ignores the fact that when (white) Republicans discriminate against Democrats in the south, they are discriminating against Black voters.”

“More and more, this Court shows itself to be little more than a partisan tool engaged in results-oriented jurisprudence, despite protestations to the contrary,” he added.

Sotomayor’s dissent, which the court’s other two Democratic appointees joined, highlighted the majority’s hypocrisy and the chaos it unleashed.

“Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos.”

In December, the Supreme Court set aside a district court’s finding that Texas intentionally used race to redraw its congressional maps last year, emphasizing that, consistent with its shadow docket order in Purcell v. Gonzalez, “that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

But now, seven months later, the majority decided to do just that, Sotomayor noted, saying it has unleashed “havoc,” and “tramples on that principle of restraint,” established in Purcell. 

“To switch to the 2023 Redistricting Plan now, however, county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the State to new congressional districts,” Sotomayor wrote. “Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts. These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the State’s total number of registered voters).”

In the order, the majority seems to suggest that Purcell only applies to lower courts, not the Supreme Court, by emphasizing “lower” federal courts, rather than just federal courts. 

But, as Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene noted, Justice Kavanaugh said otherwise in 2022’s Moore v. Harper, where he agreed with denying plaintiff’s request for “an order from this Court requiring North Carolina to change its existing congressional election districts for the upcoming 2022 primary and general elections.”

“It is too late for the federal courts to order that the district lines be changed for the 2022 primary and general elections,” Kavanaugh wrote. 

Kavanaugh went on to cite his recent concurrence in Merrill v. Allen — the first time Alabama’s congressional map appeared before the court. In that order, issued in February 2022, the Supreme Court vacated the lower court’s injunction of the map’s use, saying it was too close to the election. 

“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Sotomayor wrote. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

Ashley Cleaves contributed to this report.

The post Supreme Court’s Alabama redistricting ruling marks brazen reversal of its previous stance appeared first on Democracy Docket.

In a 6-3 ruling across ideological lines, the court granted an emergency request filed by Alabama Republicans seeking to implement a never-used map that eliminates one of the state’s two Black-majority districts.

In a fiery dissent opinion that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor said the court’s Republican-appointed majority was “wrong twice over” and accused it of deliberately “sowing chaos in Alabama” and reinforcing racial discrimination.

Sotomayor opened her dissent by saying the court had two paths before it. Down one, she wrote, was “an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar.”

Down the second path was “a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians,” she said. 

“The majority chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law. I respectfully dissent.”

In addition to being wrong on the merits, the court’s decision “inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Sotomayor wrote.

“It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians,” she wrote. “It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

Sotomayor also noted that the ruling “tramples on” the court’s Purcell principle, which has held that courts should not change voting or election rules too close to an election to avoid confusion for voters and election officials.

“The Court’s decision will cause havoc,” Sotomayor wrote. She added that county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across Alabama to new congressional districts, a process the state previously said “would take months.”

In total, as many as 600,000 voters, or roughly 15% of the state’s registered voters, could be affected by the court’s ruling.

“Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought. Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos,” Sotomayor wrote.

“Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent,” she concluded.

The post ‘It debases the democratic process’: Sotomayor slams Supreme Court’s Alabama ruling appeared first on Democracy Docket.

It sets up a November matchup against incumbent California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), one of the country’s most active legal opponents of Trump’s attacks on voting and elections. Bonta will be heavily favored.

Gates, a Republican and former Huntington Beach city attorney, finished in the top two in California’s open primary for attorney general. Under California’s top-two system, all candidates run on the same ballot regardless of party, and the two highest vote-getters advance to November.

Gates’ advance gives California Republicans a statewide candidate with direct ties to the Trump administration’s effort to use DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to seize voter rolls and push restrictive voting policies.

“We are going to make sure that elections are safe, that we have election integrity by enforcing election laws,” Gates said when announcing his candidacy in January.

Gates briefly served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon, a longtime conservative attorney and Trump-loyalist tapped to lead the division. The Civil Rights Division is the part of DOJ that has historically enforced federal civil rights laws, including voting rights protections.

Before joining DOJ, Gates served as an attorney for the city of Huntington Beach, where he staunchly defended its voter ID requirement for municipal elections, against a lawsuit from California. When he announced his DOJ appointment, Gates said he would work “to advance President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, fight to restore law and order throughout the country, and fight to restore faith in the Nation’s justice system.”

He also touted his role in Huntington Beach, saying the city had “successfully ushered in, and successfully defended in court, the State’s very first local VOTER ID law.”

Gates has also been endorsed by Reform California, a conservative group that pushed a sweeping and restrictive statewide ID initiative onto the November ballot.

At DOJ, Gates helped lead one of the administration’s California voter roll cases. In June 2025, the department sued Orange County Registrar of Voters Robert Page, claiming the county had failed to turn over unredacted voter records the administration demanded. 

The complaint was signed by Gates and sought a court order forcing the county to provide the information.

Voting rights advocates have warned that the Trump administration’s demands for sensitive voter data are part of a broader push to purge voter rolls under the false premise of widespread voter fraud.

Gates’ short DOJ tenure ended under disputed circumstances. 

A federal personnel document obtained by the Orange County Register indicated Gates was terminated “for cause,” meaning the department said it had a reason to fire him. 

Gates denied that he was fired and said the allegations against him were a “100% fabrication.”

Bonta has taken the opposite posture toward Trump’s election agenda. In April, he co-led a multistate lawsuit challenging Trump’s sweeping election executive order, which sought to restrict voter eligibility and mail-in voting by giving the federal government more control over voter lists.

With Bonta and Gates advancing, California voters will face a stark choice in November: whether to keep the state’s top legal office in the hands of one of Trump’s most prolific courtroom adversaries, or elevate a Republican who steered the administration’s anti-voting crackdown.

The post Michael Gates, who helped lead DOJ’s voter roll grab, advances in California attorney general race appeared first on Democracy Docket.

When the court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Louisiana v. Callais, it found that intentional racial discrimination in voting remains unconstitutional. But the new ruling, to which all six conservative justices signed on, suggests that, in practice, almost no federal protections remain for non-white voters, even in extreme cases.

The most immediate impact of the ruling is that Alabama will be free to use its gerrymandered map in its primary election, which has been rescheduled for August.

A federal court found in 2023 that lawmakers intentionally discriminated in drawing Alabama’s congressional map, which diluted the voting strength of Black Alabamians. The Supreme Court agreed, and in 2024 the state was required to use a fairer map, with two Black-majority districts. 

“As to intentional vote dilution, the District Court did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus,” the court’s conservative majority wrote.

In the April 29 Callais ruling — which all but ended the VRA’s ability to block maps that reduce minority voting power — Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the decision had “no bearing” on the court’s earlier finding on Alabama’s map. He wrote that maps could still be found in violation of the VRA if it was proven that they were drawn with the explicit intent of discriminating against a state’s minority voters. 

Still, shortly after Callais, Alabama lawmakers resuscitated the state’s previously blocked map. They did so while an active election was happening, hoping that courts would quickly step in and allow them to use it. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey scheduled a special election based on that map for August 11, also betting on courts’ approval. 

But last month, a three-judge panel found the map to still be a violation of the 14th Amendment and the court’s new legal standard under Section 2 of the VRA. Alabama appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. 

The request has been seen as the first major test of the high court’s new approach to policing racial discrimination in voting.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar,” the court’s dissenting justices wrote. “Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

Citing the election law doctrine known as the Purcell principle, the justices said the lower court erred by changing election rules close to an upcoming election, risking confusion for voters and election administrators.

“To switch to the 2023 Redistricting Plan now, however, county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the State to new congressional districts,” the dissent added. “Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts. These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the State’s total number of registered voters).”

Critics say the Court’s conservative majority has applied that principle selectively to reach its preferred outcomes. In December, the Court invoked similar reasoning to stay a lower-court order blocking Texas’ 2025 congressional map, which the lower district court had found likely to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The map is expected to give Republicans several additional seats in Congress.

The post Supreme Court greenlights Alabama’s racial gerrymander, signaling free rein for states to discriminate appeared first on Democracy Docket.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, expressed concern during a hearing Tuesday that the order poses a serious risk of unconstitutionally disenfranchising eligible voters, according to reporting by Reuters. 

The order, signed by Trump in March, tasks the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration with creating a nationwide voter eligibility list — and then directs the U.S. Postal Service to restrict the delivery of mail-in ballots based on that list. Voting rights advocates and legal experts universally agreed that such a decree is unconstitutional, as states — not the executive branch — hold the power to administer elections. 

The order was met with a barrage of lawsuits, including the one Talwani heard Tuesday, filed by attorneys general from 22 states and Washington, D.C., as well as a coalition of pro-voting groups, seeking to block the order. 

“Mail voting helps millions of Americans participate in our democracy, including seniors, voters with disabilities, military families, students, caregivers, and working people,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters — one of the plaintiffs in the case — said in a statement. “No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite election rules or dictate how states administer their elections.”

During the motion hearing in Boston, Talwani seemed unsure if it would even be possible for the federal government to create a full and accurate national voter list, which would be reason to block the order. 

“What’s the harm if I say no one can use this list for the November election?” ​Talwani reportedly asked.

Sophia Lakin, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union — one of the pro-voting plaintiffs in the case — told Democracy Docket that Talwani was also fixated on resolving the matter quickly, given how close it is to the general election.

“She was very concerned and focused on timing and how close we are to the midterm election, with primaries along the way,” Lakin said.

Lakin also said Talwani emphasized the need for a speedy ruling, to “make sure that there’s an opportunity for us to seek judicial review,” given the likelihood that Trump’s anti-mail voting order makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court before the November midterms. 

Talwani isn’t the first judge to hear a challenge to the anti-mail voting order. A federal judge last month denied a legal attempt by Democrats to stop Trump’s mail voting order, on the basis that it’s premature, given that the White House has yet to actually implement the order. 

The Democratic plaintiffs appealed that ruling Monday to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The post Trump order targeting mail voting leaves judge ‘very concerned’  appeared first on Democracy Docket.

The party will first amend the New York state constitution to allow the legislature to redraw maps mid-decade by a simple majority vote. The proposal, which voters would need to approve in a referendum in November 2027, also allows mapmakers to consider explicitly partisan goals like helping a political party win more seats. 

“These changes will ensure that our state has the tools necessary to preserve a level playing field in the face of Republican-led efforts to tilt maps and weaken democratic participation — without compromising the integrity of the Independent Redistricting Commission,” Senate President Andrea Stewart Cousins wrote in a memo to Democratic state legislators.

The memo described the proposed changes as necessary steps to conform to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively blessed partisan gerrymandering.

If adopted by the state legislature and then adopted by voters, the measure would grant the lawmakers in Albany the temporary authority to redraw maps just for the 2028 election. The state’s Independent Redistricting Commission would remain in place as the primary drafter of new maps after the decennial census and reapportionment. 

The proposal would also attempt to prevent judges from appointing a special master to redraw a map, should it be challenged successfully in court. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has pushed for Democrats to respond to the GOP gerrymandering assault President Donald Trump launched last summer. While California was able to redraw its maps ahead of upcoming midterm elections, an attempt in Virginia to do the same fell apart in the state Supreme Court.. 

Republican redraws in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana and Florida will likely help the GOP retain six to 10 more seats in November than they otherwise would have, but a Democratic counterpunch could largely erase those gains in 2028. 

Democrats currently hold 19 of New York’s 26 U.S. House seats. A partisan gerrymander could help them take upwards of four seats, turning swing districts in Long Island and the Hudson Valley into blue seats, dividing up Staten Island to remove a red-leaning district there, and targeting one of the GOP’s districts upstate. 

Election handicappers already give Democrats fair odds of taking one of those seats in the upcoming midterms, but the rest are considered safe for Republicans.

The post New York plans to help Democrats retain the House in 2028 appeared first on Democracy Docket.

A three-judge federal panel Monday scheduled a June 17 hearing to determine whether Louisiana’s new congressional plan satisfies the legal standard established by the Supreme Court when it struck down the state’s previous map with two majority-Black districts in April.

The court also ordered expedited briefing, with filings due June 5 and responses due June 12.

The hearing marks the latest escalation in an increasingly aggressive effort by the white voters who brought the Callais lawsuit. 

After successfully convincing the Supreme Court to invalidate Louisiana’s previous map containing two majority-Black congressional districts, the plaintiffs are now arguing that the state’s newly enacted replacement map may still rely too heavily on race — even though lawmakers already eliminated one of those districts.

In its order, the court said it would convene the hearing “to determine whether the newly enacted congressional plan satisfies the requirements of Louisiana v. Callais.”

The development comes just days after Louisiana enacted a new congressional map following the Supreme Court’s ruling. The new map dismantles the state’s second majority-Black district, which has been represented by U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields (D), leaving Louisiana with only one majority-Black congressional district.

For voting rights advocates, that concession was already significant. The state’s previous map with two majority-Black districts had been adopted after years of litigation brought by Black voters who argued Louisiana’s congressional lines unlawfully diluted Black voting strength despite Black residents making up roughly one-third of the state’s population.

But the white voters behind the Callais case have continued pressing the courts, arguing that even Louisiana’s remaining majority-Black district may not survive the Supreme Court’s new standard.

Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, the litigation centered strictly on the state’s second majority-Black district — a district stretching from Baton Rouge to Shreveport that the plaintiffs alleged was drawn predominantly because of race. The Court ultimately agreed, holding that Louisiana’s map violated constitutional limits on race-based redistricting.

Since then, however, the plaintiffs have urged the court to scrutinize the state’s replacement map as well, contending that lawmakers still failed to draw congressional districts without improperly considering race.

Monday’s order signals that the court believes those arguments warrant formal consideration.

The June hearing will not automatically eliminate Louisiana’s remaining majority-Black district. But it means judges will now examine whether the state’s new one-majority-Black-district map complies with the Supreme Court’s decision — creating fresh uncertainty for Black voters and civil rights advocates who warned that the Callais ruling could become a vehicle for attacking majority-Black districts more broadly.

The hearing is scheduled to begin June 17 before U.S. Circuit Judge Carl Stewart, a Clinton appointee, and U.S. District Judges David Joseph and Robert Summerhays, both Trump appointees.

The post Will Louisiana’s last majority-Black district survive Callais? A court will decide appeared first on Democracy Docket.