(The Center Square) − Louisiana’s redistricting fight arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court with a 40-year fault line at its center: whether the Voting Rights Act still permits, and sometimes requires, election maps that account for race to remedy vote dilution.
The justices spent much of Wednesday’s argument circling Thornburg v. Gingles, the 1986 decision that created the test courts use to decide when minority voters are denied an equal chance to elect their candidates of choice.
Louisiana not only questioned how that test has been applied – it urged the court to abandon it.
Civil-rights advocates framed the case as straightforward: Louisiana’s politics show extreme racial polarization, and mapmakers “packed and cracked” Black voters, leaving them with less electoral opportunity than white voters.
If Louisiana’s map is unsatisfactory, “the proper recourse is to remand and adopt one of the many alternative maps that address the Section 2 violations and satisfy the Constitution,” Janai Nelson with NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in her opening argument.
Under Gingles and the court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, they say, Section 2 allows the use of race in crafting a fix when traditional criteria can produce an additional district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidates.
In their telling, doing so is a fact-specific remedy triggered only when plaintiffs clear multiple hurdles and the totality of circumstances indicates Black voters’ strength has been submerged.
The state countered that any remedy built around race is itself a constitutional problem.
“It requires striking enough members of the majority race to sufficiently diminish their voting strength, and it requires drawing in enough members of a minority race to sufficiently augment their voting strength,” Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguiñaga said in his opening argument.
By the state’s lights, drawing a majority-Black district necessarily diminishes white voters’ influence and enshrines stereotypes about how people vote. Louisiana’s solicitor general pressed for a reset: after decades of Gingles-driven litigation, he said, the status quo has no logical endpoint and forces states into perpetual racial sorting.
Several justices probed the space between race awareness and race motivation. One line of questioning asked whether familiar mapmaking goals – keeping communities intact, protecting incumbents, or pursuing partisan advantage – can justify districts that also track race. The state replied that even well-intentioned racial line-drawing demands the highest constitutional scrutiny.
Another pressure point was duration: If race can be used as a remedy, how long can that last? Voting-rights lawyers said Section 2 is self-limiting – when polarization and segregation recede, the Gingles preconditions fail and race-based fixes fall away. Skeptical justices pressed for more concrete endpoints.
Beneath the doctrinal sparring sits a practical choice. The court can reaffirm Milligan’s near-term status quo – keeping Gingles intact and sending Louisiana back to adopt a compliant map – or it can rewrite the ground rules of minority-vote protection.
