WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservatives on Wednesday announced a major retreat from part of the Voting Rights Act that has forced states to elect at least some Black or Latino representatives to Congress as well as state and local boards.
In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that creating these majority-minority districts amounts to racial discrimination that violates the 14th Amendment.
When weighing what the Voting Rights Act requires, “we start with the general rule that the Constitution almost never permits the federal Government or a state to discriminate on the basis of race,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the court.
Alito said states may draw election districts for partisan advantage but it may not use race as a basis for redistricting.
The ruling in a Louisiana case appears to clear the way for Republican-led states across the South to redraw their election maps and eliminate voting districts that favored Black or Latino candidates for Congress, state legislatures and county boards.
The justices ruled for Louisiana’s Republican leaders and overturned the creation of a second congressional district that favors a Black Democrat.
About one-third of Louisiana’s voters are Black, but the state favors an election map that will elect white Republicans to five of its six seats in the House of Representatives.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the court’s ruling will allow “racial vote dilution in its most classic form.”
She said the decision means “a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”
But she said states across the South may draw electoral districts that deprive Black voters of equal representation.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.
Kagan said the consequences of the ruling “are likely to be far-reaching and grave.”
Lower courts had upheld the creation of a second Black-majority district in central Louisiana on the grounds that it was required under the Voting Rights Act. But Alito called that district an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
