The Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling aims to reshape local power from statehouses to school boards

The modern U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act clears the way for state officials to dramatically reshape not only Congress, but also state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and even local school boards.

The ruling, released last week in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, dismantled some of the final barriers to protecting the electoral power of black, Hispanic and other racial minority voters enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal civil rights law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting access.

The 6-3 decision all but invalidates a provision called Section 2, which required states to draw electoral maps to allow racial minority voters to vote for their elected candidates.

And while intense national attention on the fallout from the case is focused on the U.S. House of Representatives amid the 2026 congressional midterm elections, the modern rule also applies to state legislative districts and maps for county or local elections.

These localized changes only lurk further down.

“While everyone has been focused on what this means for power in Congress, it changes a whole different realm of power,” said Davante Lewis, an elected member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission and one of the litigants in a case that pushed Louisiana to draw the congressional maps that were ultimately struck down in the Callais ruling.

“This is about deciding who can be on a school board, who can be on a city council and who can be represented in the judiciary,” Lewis said.

Electoral maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after a census, but the Trump administration has encouraged Republican-led states to redraw districts in favor of the GOP, a controversial move that has led some Democratic-led states to retaliate with gerrymandering of their own.

“But after 2030, I think we will definitely see the impact of the Callais decision at the state level,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on voting rights, race and federalism.

Impact throughout the South

Critics of the ruling say it will fundamentally weaken the electoral and governing power of blacks and other minority citizens across the board, particularly in the South. There, many seats of black elected officials are located in so-called opportunity districts, which were created under the Voting Rights Act to enable black voters and voters of other minorities to elect their preferred candidates.

“At the congressional level, we’re in this redistricting race, but when it comes to the state legislative level, we’ll have to wait and see,” Crum said.

In 10 state parliaments in the south The Republicans could more than win 190 Seats currently held by Democratsmost of them are black representatives in majority-minority districts, according to one analysis published in December by voting rights groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund. At the federal level, a New York Times analysis found that Democrats are willing to do so lose a dozen seats in the US House of Representatives in the South.

In the hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Republicans across the country began calling for maps to be redrawn, particularly in states where courts had forced them to create districts where blacks or other ethnic minorities made up the majority of residents.

A US Supreme Court ruling has weakened voting rights. What does that mean and what happens now?

“These lines should all be colorblind. You should never make your decision based on race,” said Arizona Republican Sen. Warren Petersen, who is president of the state Senate and is running for attorney general.

He told Stateline that he believes both Congress and the state legislature should be overhauled in Arizona — even if it requires litigation.

Mississippi Republican Governor Tate Reeves call a special session of the legislative session That appointment is scheduled for later this month, when he wants lawmakers to draw modern electoral maps for Mississippi State Supreme Court districts. A federal judge in Mississippi must quickly decide whether to adopt a modern map for some special elections scheduled for November.

The Democrats also became vigorous. In Illinois, legislators has backed down on a proposed constitutional amendment This would have directed lawmakers to consider race when drawing district boundaries, a provision lifted directly from the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, a Democrat, said said Capitol News Illinois that lawmakers want to learn more about the ruling before putting such an amendment to voters to vote in order to prevent unintended consequences that could affect voting rights.

In many states, Republicans are initially focusing on redistricting in Congress. Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry postponed his state’s U.S. House of Representatives primary election even though postal voting has already started. In Alabama, Republican Governor Kay Ivey called a special session of the state legislature The goal is to postpone the state’s May 19 primary election in at least a handful of counties. Prominent Georgia Republicans also called for a redrawing of their state’s political map, although GOP Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement that it was too tardy for that this year.

And in North Dakota the verdict leaves a case of tribal redistribution hanging in the balance. Tribes had used Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to sue the state over a legislative district map that North Dakota lawmakers approved in 2021.

Gerrymandering to gain partisan political advantage is legal at the federal level, although some states have their own laws restricting or prohibiting it. In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is arguing against the Supreme Court’s ruling invalidates voter-approved amendments that prevent the state from gerrymandering districts based on race or political party.

However, in most states, state officials can explicitly reshape the maps to, for example, favor Republican voters, as long as they do not express their intent to disadvantage voters based on their race.

“Wave like wildfire”

Critics of last week’s Callais ruling also fear it will quickly undermine the pipeline that has allowed Black and other minority candidates to be elected to office.

“Now state legislatures can draw maps on which they choose their voters instead of them choosing them,” said Lewis, the Louisiana commissioner. “They can weaken the power of black and brown people in the state legislature, which means there are fewer people to fight a congressional map” that disenfranchises minority communities.

He fears that if black Democratic state legislators oppose their white Republican colleagues in GOP-majority legislatures, those colleagues could redraw the maps to eliminate black legislators’ seats, claiming they are only doing so for partisan reasons.

Weakening minority voting rights, he said, “will have a ripple effect.”

At local level: city councils and district administrations Usually draw these voting cardsbut the ruling could also be applied to them, said Crum, the law professor.

Arizona is one of the few states where an independent commission, rather than the state legislature, draws both congressional and legislative districts. Outside of a court order, It cannot meet until the turn of the decade.

Petersen, the Arizona state senator, said he would be prepared to pursue litigation if the state’s redistricting commission does not take redistricting actions that he says are unconstitutional. However, he does not expect modern cards before 2028.

“We have heard complaints from voters that they don’t like the way their district was drawn,” he said. “We have some people here in Arizona who represent completely remote areas.

“I think you’re going to get a better result in some of these districts,” he said, by eliminating race-based districting.

In some states, lawmakers have tried to protect themselves from losing federal protections by enacting their own voting rights laws at the state level. Ten states have their own versions of the Federal Voting Rights Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.

At least the legislature 10 other states have introduced such bills this year alone: ​​Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The modern Supreme Court ruling does not make these laws unconstitutional, Crum said.

“But people who are trying to undermine these state voting rights laws will certainly lean on some of the issues,” Crum said. “You might see them trying to emulate some of the court’s moves.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Maryland has a state-level voting rights law that was enacted last week.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.