Demise of Voting Rights Act already hurting minority voters across the country

[RandySF]

Within days of the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday to gut the Voting Rights Act (VRA), its devastating effects are already unfolding— throwing voting rights cases across the country into chaos as courts pause proceedings and GOP state officials rush to shut down claims and redraw maps.

The immediate wave of filings and court orders offers a stark preview of what’s to come as the heart of the VRA becomes almost impossible to enforce and the consequences unravel ahead of the 2026 elections.

At the center of the rapid shift is Section 2 of the VRA — the plank that has long allowed challenges to discriminatory maps and election rules.

In Callais v. Louisiana, the court said Section 2 violations require a “strong inference” of intentional discrimination, not just evidence that a system disadvantages minority voters. That significantly raises the bar for plaintiffs and opens the door for states to push and defend maps that reduce the power of Black and brown voters and that would have previously faced serious legal hurdles.



https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/demise-of-voting-rights-act-already-hurting-minority-voters-across-the-country/

[Ilikepurple]

1. I've been trying to understand how one could possibly one could get by the second and third preconditions.

“To satisfy the second and third preconditions—politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority—the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation, showing that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.”

Gerrymandering by party affiliation had already been declared legal. I have a hard time seeing that outside of thought experiments how a population can vote as a racial bloc without there being partisan affiliation. It seems now that any racial gerrymandering is not just allowed but cannot even be reviewed unless the plaintiffs show that it also cannot also be explained by the political goal of less voting power for the opposing party. This decision is powerfully wrong and should be a call to political action for many of us.

[Cha]

2. First of All: Fuck the Gestapo on the SC.

I Hope We Find a Way to make this backfire!