After years of being whittled away by federal judges, the Voting Rights Act unexpectedly survived an existential threat in 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld what’s left of the landmark civil rights law while striking down Alabama’s congressional map.
“The court didn’t make it any easier to win voting rights cases,” redistricting expert Justin Levitt told Bolts at the time. “It just declined to make it much, much, much, much, much, much harder.”
But the reprieve may have been temporary, and winning voting rights cases may still get much harder this year. A series of cases are working their way through federal courts that represent grave threats to Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits denying the right to vote “on account or race or color,” language that extends into protection against racial gerrymandering.
In these cases, conservatives are trying out a suite of new legal arguments, each of which would result in a dramatic narrowing in the scope of the VRA. The cases are still making their way through district and appellate courts, with some early rulings favoring conservatives, at times authored by judges nominated by Donald Trump. Many are expected to end up at the Supreme Court, where members of the conservative majority have already expressed skepticism at various aspects of the VRA.
Judges will decide if critical protections afforded by Section 2 of the VRA remain applicable to the present, whether the law applies to statewide races and coalition districts, and even whether voting rights groups can ever bring a lawsuit under Section 2—a sleeper case that already detonated in an appeals court last fall. The most acute stakes concern the rules of redistricting, with officials in GOP-run states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas proposing new interpretations that would fuel gerrymandering and undercut the voting power of communities of color.
Here is your roadmap to four major legal threats that may further unravel the VRA in 2024, and what cases you should be watching….