Supreme Court Voting Rights Decision an Important, If Qualified, Win

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While Allen v. Milligan should be celebrated as a victory for fair representation, it cannot be an excuse for congressional inaction.

Michael Li serves as counsel for the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, where his work focuses on redistricting, voting rights, and elections.written by Chief Justice John Roberts holding that state lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act when they redrew Alabama’s congressional map after the 2020 census.

But if the decision didn’t further dismantle voting rights protections, it also didn’t strengthen them. In many ways, in fact, the win inUnder Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, minority voters can sue to force states or localities to change voting maps if they can show that racially polarized voting interacts with the design of maps to make it impossible for minority communities to win political power. That’s exactly what Black voters argued happened in Alabama.

with Black voters, ordering Alabama to redraw its map to create two districts “where Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.” Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices, forcefullywhat they described as “Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew.” Under Alabama’s approach, the court said “a State could immunize from challenge a new racially discriminatory redistricting plan simply by claiming that it resembled an old racially discriminatory plan.”

 

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