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This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Sam Sanders in for Shamita Basu. Today, how voting rights are changing in America. At the end of April, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that significantly weakened the Voting Rights act, one of the most consequential pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The SCOTUS ruling made it easier for states to legally draw voting maps that reduced the voting power of black voters and other minority groups. In response, many Republican officials across the south quickly moved to redraw their districts.
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A handful of Southern states controlled by Republicans are scrambling to redraw their congressional maps in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that changes the Voting Rights Act.
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Several red states are now pushing to eliminate majority black districts. Now, Louisiana Republicans are trying to push through a new map, creating at least one more Republican leaning district. Tennessee lawmakers passed a new congressional map yesterday, dividing up the state's lone majority black district.
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Tonight, Alabama is set to become the latest state to redraw congressional maps in favor of Republicans, despite protests from Democratic
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lawmakers and members of the public.
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While state leaders say they're simply realigning maps with political reality, and many black voters we met fear their district will be wiped off the map, it's difficult to convey the enormity of what the Voting Rights act did, and it is very difficult to predict what its demise will do to our politics.
- [01:42]
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That's Adam Serer. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic, and he has been covering race and American democracy for years. We asked Adam to come on the show to talk about the Voting Rights act and the impact of the Supreme Court's recent decision on minority voters heading into November midterm. But first, Adam walked me through the history that got us here and how voting rights for black Americans have been contested ever since black men were first granted the right to vote under the 15th Amendment in 1870. During Reconstruction, that right to vote on paper and the right in practice ended up being two very different things. Adam began by explaining the tactics that emerged after Reconstruction, during the Jim Crow era that made it more difficult for black Americans to vote.
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Historically speaking, a lot of the racial devices used to disenfranchise black people are like, quote, unquote, race neutral, right? So, you know, they came up with these devices that are superficially race neutral, but which everybody understands are meant to disenfranchise black people. And they did disenfranchise some poor white people, but black people were the target. And everybody understood that things like a literacy test that's technically race neutral Or a poll tax. A poll tax which is technically race neutral or felony disenfranchisement. Because of the system of correctional labor peonage that emerged in the south after reconstruction, Black people constantly had crimes on their records that were based on things that we would not consider actual crimes today, but were considered crimes for the purpose of putting black people in jail so they could be forced to engage in coerced labor. There are plenty of devices that, you know, were superficially race neutral that were implemented precisely to get around the constitution. And that's what everybody understood the purpose of them was.
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By the early 1900s, the effect of these jim crow laws was staggering. In louisiana alone, black voter Registration went from 130,000 in 1896 to fewer than 1,400 in 1904. States like Mississippi, Alabama, and georgia saw similarly dramatic drops. Black representation in congress plummeted, too. More than 20 black lawmakers had served in congress in the decades following reconstruction, but by 1901, there were none.
- [04:07]
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Black representation in the south has gone from its apex during reconstruction to being almost nonexistent. You know, Ida wells, around the turn of the century, she's writing and she says, you know, the black man is defenseless without the ballot. And she attributes the height of lynching to the disenfranchisement of black men. Because politicians don't need to worry about their black constituents anymore because they can't vote. So there's no reason to interfere with these, like, barbaric public murders because the only people who can vote are the people who are committing the murders themselves. I mean, Frederick douglass talked about this as well. You know, he said the ballot box was a form of self defense just as much as the powder box by which he meant the right to bear arms. You know, my grandfather was a republican in florida in the south, when my mother was born in the 1940s. And they moved up north because they didn't want my mother and brother to have to go to a segregated school. And, you know, at that time, my grandfather couldn't really vote.
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In the 1950s and 60s, the civil rights movement took hold, along with the push for meaningful democratic reforms for black voters. Activists organized sit ins, freedom rides and marches. And in the spring of 1965, the world watched as state troopers beat peaceful demonstrators on the Edmund pettus bridge in selma, alabama. At that time, of the 15,000 Black citizens of voting age in the county, only 335 were registered to vote. The image of civil rights protesters in selma was broadcast into living rooms across the country and it helped move Congress to take action. That August, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act into law and addressed Congress in the Capitol Rotunda.
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Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. This is decades of activism and advocacy by groups like the naacp, sncc. It took a tremendous amount of effort, both from activists and both from LBJ at the time, to get it across the finish line. And we only got there because of the tremendous sacrifice of thousands and thousands of black people, and some white people as well, who were willing to go out into the streets, to march, to protest, to sit in. You think about the march in Selma where state troopers are literally beating people in public on camera. Generations, generations of people fought and died to make sure that black people could participate in the politics of this country. And until the Voting Rights act, that was a hypothetical, particularly south of the Mason Dixon line. And after the Voting Rights act, it became a reality.
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The Voting Rights act or the vra, bans discriminatory voting practices and required states with a history of discrimination to get federal approval or pre clearance before making any changes to their voting laws. The results were swift. For example, when the VRA passed, only 7% of black Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote. Within five years, that number had increased to 67%. And the number of black elected officials across the south grew from roughly 100 in 1965 to more than 1,000 by 1970.
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America was not a full multiracial democracy until 1965, until the voting Rights act passed. Because prior to that point, you had all these people who were disenfranchised based on race, who had no say in the democratic process. And so what the Voting Rights act did was lead to this explosion in black representation in Congress that had not been there since the first attempt at true multiracial democracy in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.
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For decades, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights act with broad bipartisan support. The 1982 reauthorization was especially significant because it amended the VRA and made it illegal for voting rules to have a discriminatory effect on minority voters, not just discriminatory intent.
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That reauthorization established an effects test for the Voting Rights act, which said, even if it's not intentional discrimination, if it has the effect of discriminating, then it counts as discrimination. And that was important because people were starting to hide their racism from the public record in a way that did not occur in the past. During Jim Crow, when people were Pretty vocal about it. Part of the way that black populations, but not just black, but all kinds of ethnic minorities have been disenfranchised historically is you pack or crack their populations in the drawing of maps. So you either pack them into one district where you can keep them out of the other districts and make sure that you can maximize the delegation of your particular political party by keeping them out of the process, or you can crack them, that is, divide the districts in such a way as to take a little bit of that black population and sure that they can't have influence on any of the districts, any of the individual districts. So in the end, they can't elect someone who you don't like. And what federal supervision did is it made that harder, it didn't make it impossible. And I would add, it did not make Democratic Party dominance of the country inevitable either. Republicans won plenty of elections when all of the Voting Rights act was in effect, but it did ensure that minorities were able to elect politicians that would serve their interests, whether or not they were from their same background. But they could elect those politicians who are trying to serve them, as opposed to politicians who would have another constituency whose interest they wanted to defend.
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In the years that followed, the law faced a series of legal challenges. The most significant came in 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling found that the preclearance rule was no longer constitutional. That's the rule that required certain states to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. The court argued that racial conditions had changed too much since 1965, that the law's formula was just outdated. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued in her dissent that removing federal oversight because it's working is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren't getting wet.
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The Supreme Court, every time it has struck down a chunk of the Voting Rights act, it has talked about all the progress that's been made as if it was something that was done out of the goodness of people's hearts rather than a result of the very policies that they're dismantling.
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A 2022 study from the nonpartisan think tank the Brennan center for justice found the turnout gap between white and black voters grew by 11 percentage points in states that had lost federal oversight after the Shelby decision. That brings us to today and the Supreme Court case that was recently decided, Louisiana v. Calais. It began when civil rights groups sued Louisiana for redrawing a 6 district congressional map after the 2020 census. The redistricting created only one majority black district. Despite the fact that black voters in Louisiana make up 1 in 3 voters in the state, a district court ordered Louisiana lawmakers to draw a new map.
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A court had said that Louisiana had violated the Voting Rights act because about a third of its population was black, but it was sort of trying to, you know, pack all those black voters into one district so they would only have one seat in which they could affect the outcome. And the court said that Louisiana had to create a second black district, and the Supreme Court temporarily upheld that.
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Then, in 2024, a group that self identified as non African American challenged that newly drawn map that included the second black majority district, claiming it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And last month, at the end of April, the Supreme Court agreed, 6 to 3. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, which says that states cannot use race as the predominant factor when drawing maps. That decision significantly narrowed how the Voting Rights act can be applied. It made it much harder to bring a challenge without evidence of intentional discrimination. I talked with Adam about that ruling and his analysis on its potential implications for the future.
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Basically, what the plaintiffs wanted in this case was for the Supreme Court to say that it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander for Louisiana to have to draw a second black district. This sort of implication is that white people are being discriminated against by this measure intended to achieve equality for people who are not white. That's functionally the logic of the ruling, in my view.
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All right, so what the court is essentially saying is even if a map disenfranchises black voters, that is no longer enough to challenge it. Civil rights groups now have to prove that the state intended to discriminate, not just that the map has the effect of discrimination. In places like Louisiana, though, civil rights groups argue that racism is already built into how these maps get drawn, even if lawmakers never mention race when they draw the maps. So this ruling, then, it makes challenging those maps in states like Louisiana very difficult now, right?
- [13:51]
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Yeah. Well, I think that proving intent is basically impossible. And the whole point here is that racially polarized voting leads to discriminatory voting measures. But the Supreme Court has turned that logic on its head. It's turned it upside down. It's inverted it and said, well, because politics and race are so intertwined, you can't say whether or not they're doing it for racial reasons or political reasons. But, you know, this is sort of absurd because what it says is that the intentions of the white people doing the disenfranchising matter, but the effect on the people Being disenfranchised doesn't matter.
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So when this ruling was announced almost immediately, GOP leadership in Louisiana in the midst of primary voting said, go back to the drawing board and redraw these maps right now. And there was this tweet from Brad Parscale, Trump's former campaign manager. He wrote, quote, this is huge. Right now. This only applies to Louisiana. But states can challenge their congressional maps and with precedent, pick up Republican seats. If states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually, end quote. What are we to make of statements like these?
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Well, I mean, I don't want to make predictions, and I think Parscale's statement is more interesting as a statement of intent than a prediction. As Republicans have discovered with previous aggressive gerrymanders, you can't really control where people move. So sometimes districts you think are going to be bulletproof are in fact, not. So there are no permanent majorities after Obama. Obama seemed to have assembled this invincible coalition, and then Donald Trump shattered it when Hillary Clinton tried to put it back together for her campaign. I think politics is very hard to predict, but the cultural and political changes wrought by the Voting Rights act are so massive that it's difficult to communicate how much changed as a result. I think certainly there's no Barack Obama. You know, the Voting Rights act was reauthorized under George W. Bush, like, 98, 0 in the Senate. But after Barack Obama got elected, I mean, I was in the court, I was like, actually at the court covering the arguments when Antonin Scalia said that the Voting Rights act had turned into a, quote, unquote, racial entitlement.
- [16:05]
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I think it is attributable, very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.
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And again, American culture has been tremendously shaped by the enfranchisement of black people. Because when you are accountable to people, you have to, you know, when you are staying in office, you're staying in power depends on your winning these people over. You are going to be soliciting their approval, you're going to be polite to them. You're not going to disrespect them. And so I don't know what our politics looks like from here on out, but it's been years now that every Congress that comes in is more diverse than the Congress before it, and we'll see what happens. But that may not be true anymore.
- [16:48]
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What about Democrats? How are they reacting? We've seen them also get involved in this back and forth redistricting war. What are they saying now in the midst of this ruling?
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Right. So this all got started because Donald Trump said he wanted Texas to redraw its districts in order to keep the House. The DOJ letter sort of implied that Texas districts were too diverse, so they were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Again, this is sort of this concept of reverse racism, which is being applied to these amendments that were adopted after Reconstruction to ensure that there would never again be an underclass in public life being used to maintain an upper political caste. In any case, the Democrats have in recent years begun to join in to what is fundamentally a race to the bottom. What this kind of aggressive district drawing is is an attempt to insulate politicians from their own voters. So if the voters get mad at you and want to throw you out, but you've drawn the district in a really effective way, they won't be able to do that. And that's not what democracy is. You're supposed to be able to lose in a democracy. But the only thing worse than constitutional hardball is unilateral constitutional hardball. So the reality is that the Democrats are starting to engage in some of the same stuff that Republicans are doing in terms of aggressive political gerrymanders, the purpose of which is to ensure that Republican votes are wasted and that they cannot elect Republican representatives in certain districts without a substantial landslide of some sort. They're doing that, and it's not good for democracy. But there's no way to get to de escalation unless the de escalation is mutual. So California said, if Texas does this, we're going to do it. And Virginia said, if Texas does this, we're going to do it. Texas went ahead and did it. And so now these other states are also doing it because they see and see correctly. This sort of aggressive gerrymandering by the Republican Party is an attack on their voters. The problem here is that whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you're a Republican in a blue state or a Democrat in a red state, what this is trying to do is essentially make your voice not matter. And if things continue like this, you cannot have a democracy without competitive races. And, I mean, I think the Democrats have to respond this way to get to a point where Republicans are willing to come to the table and, like, find some kind of solution for this problem. But until that happens, I don't know what the country is gonna look like.
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Does the Voting Rights act still actually exist, or has it been rendered so toothless that it really doesn't?
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Well, I would say that it no longer has the power to protect ethnic minority communities in the United States in the way that it once did. It's still on the books. And I think that means if the composition of the Court changes in a particular way, you might see some of the Voting Rights act restored. I mean, I think what's interesting here is that this is how the Supreme Court acted after Reconstruction. Piece by piece, they essentially nullified all of the Civil War amendments. They essentially said all these things we put in place in the government to ensure multiracial democracy. We kind of don't want to do those things anymore. Now, what I would say the difference is is that back then, the country was actually substantially more racist, and there was not a lot of popular will among white people to protect black rights. What the Supreme Court doing now, it is doing with full knowledge of the consequences of what it's doing, and it is doing it without that same kind of popular pressure that you had in the 1880s and 1870s.
- [20:37]
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What recourse is there for opponents to the current Supreme Court majority?
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Oh, I think there are a lot of institutional changes you can make to the Supreme Court in order to check its power. You can do things like you can pass the Voting Rights act again. You can strip the courts of jurisdiction to judge certain cases. You can expand the Court. The Court hasn't always had nine seats. In fact, Republicans during Reconstruction shrank the Court because really, from what to what? I can't remember the exact. I think it was from nine to seven, because they didn't want Andrew Johnson, who was an extremely racist president who opposed Reconstruction. They didn't want him to appoint any justices. So they shrank the court. And then when Grant got in, they expanded the Court again. So this is the kind of thing that actually has been done before. You know, Republicans often talk about it as if it's some kind of nuclear attack on the legitimacy of the Court. But the truth is that the size of the Court is not constitutionally set, and Congress can expand it and add more justices. You can impose term limits. Some of these have more difficult statutory or constitutional burdens to overcome than others. But I do think that if Democrats are determined to restore these kinds of protections, there are both more and less aggressive ways to do it. But there are certainly ways to do it. There has always historically been a push and pull between the Court and the other branches. And I do think that if the Court feels like if their power is threatened by the other two branches, they will sometimes pull back. The most famous example of this, of course, is FDR threatening to pack the court and his plan failing, but the Court also becoming less aggressive about striking down FDR's policies. So I think there's a number of institutional changes you can make. I think there's a number of political changes you can make. But to some extent, it will take as much of a long term discipline campaign to reform the Court as it took to get the court to this place.
- [22:41]
A
So, I mean, it seems like all of this just proves how race is still such a living issue when we talk about how our democracy functions.
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That's right. You know, to some extent we are still dealing with the aftermath of slavery here, whether that's the Civil War Amendments, the way that one of the framers of the 14th Amendment put it, John Bingham, he said that this is meant to repeal the horrid blasphemy, that this is a white man's country. So this is to some extent this fight over who gets to be part of American democracy is the story of America. I mean, I don't think it's just a story about race, but it is substantially a story about race. And it's difficult to convey the enormity of what the Voting Rights act did. And it is very difficult to predict what its demise will do to our politics given that these forces, as we can see from the fact that there's a president in office who refers to immigrants of African descent as garbage, whether they're Somalians or Haitian Americans, slandering them with various crimes. I mean, we're in a situation now where overt racism has reentered our politics and we are busy dismantling the protections against that racism in political and economic and cultural life. And I don't know what the long term effect of that will be, but I don't think it's going to be good.
- [24:13]
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Adam Serwer, thank you so much for doing this work and following this story and helping to educate me and our listeners. Appreciate you.
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Thank you.
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We'll include a link on our Show Notes page to Adam Serwer's Atlantic Peace. Voters can be disenfranchised now and every weekend. You can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, the little headphones at the bottom to find.