Knowing your voting rights (and how they’re being kneecapped)

Fun fact: Ruby Bridges has an Instagram account. This is both a reality of the period, as well as cause for whiplash. Back in 1960, Bridges made history at just 6 years old as the first Black child to attend Louisiana’s erstwhile whites-only William Frantz Elementary School. Today, she’s another public figure on social media. Nothing about this is unique, because to have an Instagram account is to exist in the digital age. It is, however, fundamentally tragic. Now 71, Bridges has lived long enough to maintain an online platform from which she can observe Black children today be denied the rights she risked bodily harm to exercise 66 years ago. 

The United States hasn’t gotten to the point of re-segregating society just yet, but as the Republican administration works overtime to rob Black Americans of their electoral power, imagining a future in which it does reach that point is soberingly easy. All anyone must do to glimpse that future is look at the country’s present: in late April the U.S. Supreme Court stuck their robes where they’re not wanted by declaring Louisiana’s 2024 election map to be “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” a $20 phrase for communicating racism in socially, if not legally, acceptable terms. 

Bigoted double-speak is, in fact, the crux of the court’s majority opinion, struck precisely and unsurprisingly along partisan lines: 6-3, with the conservative justices outvoting the liberal justices. What the former have done is perform a fresh, and thoroughly inept, reading of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a milestone achievement of the Civil Rights Movement that has safeguarded racial minorities’ voting power in the United States for more than half a century. Specifically, as Justice Samuel Alito scribbles for his cohorts in the majority, the conservatives wag their fingers at “intentional racial discrimination.” The argument they’ve made is that yes, sure, fine, in theory political gerrymandering does indeed limit minority voting power, but if plaintiffs are going to file lawsuits about it, they’d better be prepared to prove intent.

Bluntly, this is idiotic (to say nothing of the misleading data Alito cites in his opinion). Proving discriminatory intent is remarkably challenging, because the sort of smoking gun that Alito and his fellow conservative justices believe should be required to establish racist intent is rare; catching everyday Americans being racist on social media or out in public may be a breeze, but elected officials drawing electoral maps are much likelier to watch what they say and how they say it. No one’s going to casually admit that they’re redrawing voting maps for the sole purpose of suppressing BIPOC voters. As such, the decision in Louisiana v. Callais in April disenfranchises those voters while permitting white supremacists a smokescreen for blatant prejudice.

For clarity, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act puts forward that “no voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” This, again, is a smartypants way of saying that neither on state nor local levels can Americans be denied their vote on the basis of race. Furthermore, Section 2 establishes that the law is being violated when “political processes” deny equal participation by members of protected classes (minorities). What is indicated here is so far away from the notion of Alito’s claims of “racial gerrymandering” as to make them seem fantastical.

Mere days after the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the Tennessee Republican party sliced and diced the state’s lone remaining majority-minority district, settled in Memphis, ultimately dividing a Democratic stronghold across three seats.

No matter; the damage is done. Mere days after the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the Tennessee Republican party sliced and diced the state’s lone remaining majority-minority district, settled in Memphis, ultimately dividing a Democratic stronghold across three seats. The goal here is to swing the district to the right, of course. In the redistricting process, state legislatures draw lines delineating the districts from which public officials—from members of the House of Representatives, local city council and school board members, to those very same state legislatures responsible for redrawing the maps—are elected.

When done correctly, as in “fairly,” a redistricted map will acknowledge changes in population and divvy up representation in Congress and the state legislature accordingly—meaning districts with, say, higher percentages of BIPOC voters can theoretically enjoy BIPOC political representation. On the other hand, when done the way the Tennessee Republicans have, redistricting is effectively a cudgel for muffling minority voices in elections. Vote dilution like this is achieved typically through one of two techniques: “cracking” a voting bloc by dividing it over multiple districts, therefore reducing that bloc to minorities in each; and “packing,” when voters in a targeted bloc are stuffed into a few districts, giving them overwhelming voting power in those districts while watering down their voting power overall.

It’s impossible to picture Tennessee Republicans making such a brazen power grab without SCOTUS’ meddling in Louisiana’s maps. Now add this as salt to the wound: despite pledging to maintain legal guardrails to forestall attempts at intentional racial discrimination, SCOTUS moved to reverse its own 2023 decision in Alabama less than a week after Tennessee redrew its maps, effectively obsolescing the two Black members of its congressional delegation the boot via redistricting. (They’re not alone, either; a number of Black lawmakers now find themselves on the cusp of losing their seats in Congress in the wake of decisions like these.)

Things, put tactlessly, are grim, though not dire. A panel of three federal judges ruled, again, that the 2023 maps violate Section 2 despite the fresh coat of paint SCOTUS slathered over it (and took a subtle dig at SCOTUS at the same time); one could argue that the plaintiffs in the original Alabama redistricting case, Allen v. Milligan (2023), have laid out a roadmap for fighting back against Republican-led efforts to usurp the will of the people through such redistricting gambits. But that simply means that there’s a fight in progress, and that the people currently are in a dead heat with the American right wing’s anti-democratic campaign.