As usual, US states redrew their congressional district maps after the 2020 census. Due to a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s, congressional and state legislative districts are required to contain an equal number of people. “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in Reynolds v. Sims, and “the weight of a citizen’s vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives.” The Warren Court’s rulings expressly did not apply to the Senate, which represents states rather than individual people, and is not subject to the principle of equal suffrage. The Senate remained a stalwart check on equality of rights.Thanks to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 — particularly Section 2 — each state’s districts also had to avoid diluting minority voting power. It was fine to draw congressional maps that benefit certain political parties (a practice the Supreme Court recently declined to stop), but doing so based on race would, in theory, draw the ire of the federal government.So when Louisiana released its 2020 map, a few eyebrows were raised. Of the new map’s six voting districts, only one contained a majority of black residents, even though black people made up about one-third of the state’s population. The new map was challenged in federal court for violating Section 2 of the VRA, and a judge agreed that it underrepresented the black voters. Louisiana was ordered to redraw the map and add a second majority-black district so that black voters would have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.But in 2024, a group calling themselves “non–African American voters” challenged the new map, arguing that it violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which guarantee equal protection under the law and protect the right to vote from racial discrimination. The case went to the Supreme Court under the name Louisiana v….
