The End, Hopefully, of Race Based Gerrymandering
The Constitution Doesn’t Sort People by Race —
And Neither Should Our Districts
Today’s Supreme Court Ruling, What It Actually Says, and a Better Way Forward for Every Voter
Today’s Ruling: What the Supreme Court Actually Decided
This morning, the United States Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision in Louisiana v. Callais (No. 24-109, decided April 29, 2026). In a 6–3 ruling, the Court’s majority held that Louisiana’s congressional map — redrawn specifically to ensure that race was the predominant factor in forming a second majority-Black district — is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Alito, 2026).
The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, resolved a question that had gone unanswered for over 30 years: Can compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act serve as a compelling government interest that justifies the intentional, race-predominant drawing of a legislative district? The Court answered: only if Section 2 actually requires it — and under the Court’s properly construed reading of the statute, it did not require Louisiana’s map here (Alito, 2026).
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. Compliance with §2 thus could not justify the State’s use of race-based redistricting here. The State’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
— Justice Samuel Alito, Majority Opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026)
Chief Justice Roberts added that the Civil War Amendments — the 13th, 14th, and 15th — were “forged at tremendous human cost to secure a constitutional order grounded in equality before the law — not racial classifications,” and that today’s decision “restores that understanding and reaffirms that the Constitution does not permit sorting Americans by race in the exercise of political power” (Roberts, C.J., concurring in judgment, 2026).
The Court was careful to note that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act remains on the books. What today’s ruling changes is how a plaintiff must prove a violation: the evidence must support a strong inference that a state intentionally drew district lines to deny minority voters equal opportunity specifically because of their race — not merely because of their partisan preferences (Alito, 2026). The new framework requires that illustrative maps presented as evidence cannot themselves use race as a drawing criterion, and that racial bloc-voting analyses must control for partisan affiliation.
The Jim Crow Parallel: Race-Based Classification Is the Problem — Not the Solution
Here is the uncomfortable historical truth at the heart of this debate: Jim Crow did not suppress Black voting by ignoring race. Jim Crow suppressed Black voting by obsessing over it.
Beginning in the late 1870s and accelerating through the early 20th century, Southern state legislatures enacted a deliberate architecture of racial classification designed to strip Black Americans of political power. Poll taxes, literacy tests written to be impossible for Black applicants to pass, grandfather clauses, property-ownership requirements, and outright physical intimidation — every single one of these tools was race-targeted. As the ACLU’s own historical timeline documents, by 1940 only 3% of eligible African Americans in the South were registered to vote, directly because of laws that sorted people by the color of their skin (American Civil Liberties Union, 2024).
Louisiana itself provides one of the most infamous examples. In 1896, the state passed “grandfather clauses” designed specifically to prevent former slaves and their descendants from voting. As a direct result, Black voter registration in Louisiana collapsed from 44.8% in 1896 to just 4.0% four years later (American Civil Liberties Union, 2024). Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia rapidly followed suit.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 — signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965 — was Congress’s direct answer to this racial classification system. Its original Section 2 stated simply that no standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed “to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” (Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89‑110, 79 Stat. 437). The law was designed to end the government’s use of race as a tool to sort and suppress voters.
This is precisely why today’s ruling deserves support, not condemnation. When a state legislature draws a district by connecting communities 250 miles apart — stretching from Shreveport in the northwest all the way to Baton Rouge in the southeast — for the explicit, acknowledged purpose of achieving a specific racial population threshold, it is doing precisely what Jim Crow did: sorting Americans into political boxes based on the color of their skin (Alito, 2026). The constitutional principle is the same regardless of the stated intent. Race-based sorting by government is race-based sorting by government. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids it in either direction.
What Democrats Are Saying Today — And Why the Argument Doesn’t Hold Up
Within hours of the ruling, prominent Democratic leaders and progressive organizations took to social media to declare that today’s decision takes America “back to Jim Crow.” Let’s look at what was actually said, and then take it seriously enough to examine it honestly.
“This ruling opens the door to racial gerrymandering that will take us back to Jim Crow. This ruling is a betrayal of Black voters and the promise of democracy.”
— NAACP, Official Statement via Facebook, April 29, 2026
“The far-right high Court has chosen to drag America backward towards Jim Crow, tearing down one of the most important protections that kept politicians from rigging voting maps for their own power and silencing voters of color.”
— Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, April 29, 2026
“Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave.”
— Justice Elena Kagan, Dissenting Opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026)
With respect to Justice Kagan and to the civil rights organizations that have dedicated themselves to protecting minority voters, this argument gets the history precisely backward — and it actually makes the case for today’s ruling rather than against it.
Jim Crow was not simply “discrimination against Black voters.” Jim Crow was government using race as the explicit organizing principle for sorting people into different categories with different rights. That was the evil the Constitution was written to eradicate. The 14th and 15th Amendments were written to put an end to exactly that practice — to make race irrelevant in the eyes of the law, not to make it the permanent organizing principle of political power (U.S. Constitution, amend. XIV; U.S. Constitution, amend. XV).
A system that draws congressional districts by connecting pockets of one racial group across 250 miles of geography is not the opposite of Jim Crow — it is the same mechanism wearing different clothes. Both systems insist that race must be the determinative factor in how political power is allocated. Both systems say: first, identify voters by race; second, assign them political weight based on that racial identity. Today’s Court said, correctly, that the Constitution is a colorblind document, and that the government has no business sorting Americans by race — for any purpose, in any direction.
The real threat to Black voters — to all voters — is not a court that refuses to let government draw lines based on race. The real threat is a system in which party bosses of either party can draw maps designed to entrench their own power indefinitely, using race, partisanship, or any other tool available to them. That system is what we need to fix.
A Better Way: Competitive Districts That Make Every Party Earn Its Seat
Today’s ruling clears the constitutional underbrush. It removes the argument that racial sorting is a permissible — or even required — tool in redistricting. That is good. But it leaves unanswered the more important question: what should guide redistricting instead?
My position is straightforward, and it is grounded in what a constitutional republic is actually supposed to do.
Redistricting should be governed by a single overriding principle: the balance of voters between parties should be as near equal as possible across districts, using historical voting records as the guide. No partisan thumb on the scale. No racial sorting. No incumbent-protection schemes. Just an honest, data-driven effort to draw lines that create the most genuinely competitive districts the geography and population allow.
This is not a radical idea. It is a well-researched one. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign published a peer-reviewed model in the INFORMS journal Operations Research that demonstrates district plans can be drawn that are simultaneously compact and optimized for political fairness — using three core metrics: vote-seat proportionality (the “efficiency gap”), partisan symmetry, and competitiveness. Their Wisconsin case study proved that you can have fair and compact districts at the same time (Swamy et al., 2022).
Researchers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Cologne developed a formal mathematical framework demonstrating that a competitive redistricting system — one that involves both parties in the process under neutral rules — can guarantee that “majorities cannot be stolen,” and that the party winning the popular vote is guaranteed a majority in the legislature (Bierbrauer & Polborn, 2022).
Research published in PS: Political Science & Politics found that independent redistricting commissions with balanced partisan composition, explicit fairness criteria, and non-majoritarian approval mechanisms consistently outperform legislative redistricting on partisan fairness metrics — and are 2.25 times more likely to produce competitive districts than maps drawn by partisan legislatures (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
What does this mean in practice? It means that laws governing redistricting should require:
- Maps be drawn using historical voting data to target near-equal partisan balance between districts.
- No racial classification of any kind used as a drawing criterion — consistent with today’s ruling.
- No incumbent-protection provisions that allow politicians to choose their voters rather than the other way around.
- An independent, bipartisan or nonpartisan commission — not the state legislature — to draw and approve maps.
- Transparency and public access to the data, maps, and decision-making process.
Why This Creates a Better Democratic Process for Everyone
The argument for competitive, balanced districts is not a Republican argument or a Democratic argument. It is a pro-voter argument — and it is the argument every citizen should be making, regardless of party.
When districts are drawn to be safe for one party, two things happen that harm everyone. First, incumbents stop being accountable. If a representative knows they cannot lose a general election because the district has been pre-wired in their favor, they have no incentive to represent all of their constituents — only the base of their party. Second, third parties and independent candidates are effectively locked out. They can never compete against an entrenched machine when the map itself is the machine.
Competitive districts fix both problems. When both major parties must genuinely compete for every seat, they must earn it — by developing platforms that speak to the actual needs and values of real constituents. The result is better representation, better accountability, and a republic that is actually open to new voices and new ideas.
And here is the point that the Jim Crow comparison most profoundly misses: genuinely competitive districts, drawn on a nonracial, nonpartisan basis, protect minority voters far more durably than racial sorting ever could. When a district is competitive, every vote matters. When every vote matters, no voter — of any race or background — can be taken for granted or written off. That is the constitutional republic the Civil War Amendments promised. It is long past time we built it.
The Bottom Line
Today’s Supreme Court decision is not a step toward Jim Crow. It is a step away from the underlying logic that made Jim Crow possible: the belief that the government has the right to sort Americans by race when drawing the lines of political power. The Constitution has always forbidden that. Today, the Court finally and explicitly said so.
The work that remains is to build a redistricting system worthy of a constitutional republic — one that gives every voter an equal stake, makes every representative actually compete for their seat, and refuses to let any party — mine included — pick their voters before a single vote is cast.
That is the standard I am committed to fighting for in the legislature, and I invite you to hold me to it.
— Will Campbell
References
- Alito, S. (2026). Opinion of the Court. Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026). Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf
- American Civil Liberties Union. (2024). Voting Rights Act: Major dates in history. ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/voting-rights-act-major-dates-in-history
- Bierbrauer, F., & Polborn, M. (2022, December 29). Competitive fair redistricting [Working paper]. Vanderbilt University & University of Cologne. https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd/wp-content/uploads/sites/2148/2023/02/redistricting_20221228.pdf
- Cambridge University Press. (2023). Independent redistricting commissions are associated with more competitive elections. PS: Political Science & Politics, 56(2). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/
- Civil Rights Leaders. (2026, April 29). Civil rights leaders respond to Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. https://civilrights.org/2026/04/29/civil-rights-leaders-respond-supreme-court-decision-louisiana-v-callais/
- Kagan, E. (2026). Dissenting opinion. Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026). Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf
- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (2026, April 29). Today’s Supreme Court decision in Louisiana vs. Callais is a direct attack on Black voters [Facebook post]. NAACP. https://www.facebook.com/naacp/
- National Archives. (2021, October 5). Voting Rights Act (1965). U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act
- Swamy, R., King, D., & Jacobson, S. (2022). Multiobjective optimization for politically fair districting: A scalable multilevel approach. Operations Research. Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/
- U.S. Constitution, amend. XIV, § 1. Equal protection of the laws. Ratified 1868. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
- U.S. Constitution, amend. XV, § 1. Right of citizens to vote regardless of race. Ratified 1870. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-15/
- Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89‑110, 79 Stat. 437. An act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/voting-rights-act