How Voting Rights Groups Are Rallying to Fight After the Supreme Court Hollowed a Landmark Law

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling to narrow a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, voting and civil rights advocates in Southern states are rallying to attempt to protect the electoral power of racial minority groups. 

The conservative-majority court overturned Louisiana’s electoral map in a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines on Wednesday, finding that redrawing the state’s voting lines to add a second Black-majority district constituted an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The decision significantly weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in voting and has been used for decades to protect against attempts to diminish minority voters’ electoral strength.

The ruling could have sweeping consequences for minority representation in government and the balance of power in Congress. It opens the door for Republican-led states, particularly in the South, to redraw congressional maps to eliminate some majority-minority districts represented by Democrats in favor of new lines that could help the GOP gain additional seats in the House.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by her liberal colleagues that she opted to read out loud from the bench, a rare move signaling the vehemence of her opposition to the court’s decision.

Republicans have celebrated the decision, which President Donald Trump called “a BIG WIN for Equal Protection under the Law.”

“It returns the Voting Rights Act to its Original Intent, which was to protect against intentional Racial Discrimination,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Democrats and voting and civil rights groups, meanwhile, have condemned the ruling and vowed to take action to counter its potential impact on minority voters’ electoral power.

“I'm disheartened by the Supreme Court decision to betray minority voters, particularly Black voters in the South,” Charles Taylor, executive director of the Mississippi Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) tells TIME. “It is as if the Supreme Court has made it clear their judgments are not impartial, but their judgment is about political power and political expediency at the expense of diluting black voting power.” 

Here’s how the NAACP Mississippi and other organizations in the South are planning to fight in the wake of the decision

Mobilizing voters

Ashley Shelton, the President and CEO of The Power Coalition for Equality and Justice, a Louisiana-based community organizing group, stresses to TIME that voting is more important than ever following the Supreme Court’s decision. 

“For those folks that believe in a multi-racial democracy, we all have to get out and vote,” she says. “The answer has to be that voters have to turn out en masse in the fall and elect a Congress that is going to restore so many of the rights that have been lost.”

Shelton has been working “feverishly” to close the voter registration gap among Black and other voters of color in Louisiana, which has the second largest Black population in the U.S. proportionate to its population, exceeded only by its neighbor, Mississippi. Her organization is currently in the midst of a road show in partnership with other groups, travelling around the state to educate people on upcoming Louisiana elections, the impacts of the Supreme Court decision, and how “folks can take action and engage.”

“We are all hands on deck, and the focus is education, registration, and mobilization, and, of course, protecting the vote,” she says. “We remain undeterred.”

Taylor, of the NAACP Mississippi, is working closely with a vast network of colleagues in 71 of the state’s 82 counties to stoke “civic engagement.” He is coordinating town halls across the state to explain the now limited reach of the Voting Rights Act, and says the NAACP will also be at the nation’s Capitol, pressuring lawmakers and "uplifting voices of color.”

“Our ultimate aim, particularly as it relates to voting rights, is for all eligible Mississippi voters to participate in the electorate,” Taylor tells TIME. “We believe that an expanded participating electorate will grow to a more pure democracy.”

Sarah Ovaska, a strategist at the Southern Leadership for Voter Engagement (SOLVE) network, a coalition that aims to educate and mobilize voters in the South to protect voting rights, is optimistic. She points out that Southern communities have rallied in the wake of past moves weakening the Voting Rights Act––such as the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted another core provision of the law.

Ovaska, too, is organizing around the South, working to drive community engagement, education, and voter registration.

“We have been here, and we have fought back, and we have won,” she tells TIME. “This is a setback, but this is not going to be the end of building power in the South.” 

Pushing to enact new voting rights protections

In addition to mobilizing and educating voters in the South, advocates are calling for lawmakers to pass new legislation protecting voting rights—both on a state and local level and in Congress.

Rhyane Wagner, a director at the media advocacy organization Alabama Values Progress, says that state-level voting rights acts could help counteract the impacts of the court’s decision, though they would apply on a smaller scale than the landmark federal law. 

Following the Supreme Court’s Wednesday decision, it will be “really hard to bring a racial discrimination case,” she says, but a state VRA “restores protections” and ensures “that maps with discriminatory impacts remain illegal at the state level.”

The court’s decision has also prompted renewed calls for Congress to pass new voting rights protections at the federal level.

“This is really a call to action to Congress to step in and ensure that our elections are fair,” says Hillary Harris Klein, a senior counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.  

While Congress “can't directly challenge” the Supreme Court ruling, she says, it can “enact new statutes, via the law, in order to protect voters.” 

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, the Congressional Black Caucus issued a statement “demanding a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act without delay.” The bill, which passed the House in 2021 but has remained stalled in the Senate, would restore and strengthen protections for voting rights from the weakened Voting Rights Act.

“We must become too big to rig so that we take back the House and Senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—and go even further, toward stronger, more comprehensive protections that meet the scale of this moment,” the caucus said.

In addition to passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Klein says that “Congress could absolutely ban partisan gerrymandering,” contending that is “fully within” lawmakers’ remit. She adds that Congress also has the power to enact “alternative election structures,” such as proportional representation systems. In such systems, power is split among parties in proportion to the share of the vote they receive, in contrast with the winner-take-all model.

“There are reforms out there that Congress could do that would not require a constitutional amendment,” Klein tells TIME. 

Preparing to challenge redrawn maps

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected to significantly raise the legal barriers to challenging electoral maps that dilute the voting power of racial minority groups.

In the court’s majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” and does not apply in cases in which plaintiffs challenging district maps “cannot disentangle race from the State’s race-neutral considerations, including politics.”

Klein notes, however, that there are still legal protections baked into the Constitution that could be used to mount legal battles against anticipated Republican moves to redraw congressional maps in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling. 

“I think it's important to remember that the Constitution still exists––intentional discrimination is still illegal in voting plans,” Klein says. “I should be clear that this decision absolutely does not provide grounds for governments to go in and try to destroy minority-opportunity districts. I believe that would be blatantly unconstitutional. I believe it would be a violation of the 14th and 15th amendments.”

Taylor, of the NAACP Mississippi, tells TIME he’s already working with NAACP lawyers in anticipation of challenging unfairly drawn maps. 

“If maps are approved that dilute black voting power, we will continue to fight,” he says.