SOUTHERN STATES — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act should focus on intentional racial discrimination, a legal standard that is notoriously difficult to prove in court. According to federal court records, active legal fights over at least 17 voting maps or election systems for state and local governments are now affected by the ruling.

Over the past decade, the majority of decisions that have ordered changes to redistricting maps or election systems based on Section 2 have come out of cases about local governments, mostly in Southern states, according to analysis by the Brennan Center. Latino voters have filed Section 2 lawsuits over Washington's state legislative map and a Pennsylvania school district's at-large system of electing board members, and Native American voters are in a legal fight over North Dakota's legislative map.

Last week, North Carolina state Rep. Rodney Pierce agreed to drop the lawsuit he and another Black voter brought in 2023 to challenge the state's Senate map. "It's a sad day for our democracy," Pierce said. "The Supreme Court's ruling has effectively made the Voting Rights Act a meaningless law with no teeth. Because of that decision, there is no longer a path open to us to protect the voting rights of Black citizens in my part of the State so we have dismissed the suit."

Challengers who want to prove that a voting map violates Section 2 are now required to separate race from partisan preference when trying to show that voting in an area is racially polarized. "That's another wrinkle. It's a mess," law professor Gilda Daniels said.

Daniels said local vigilance would be necessary going forward. "It's very important for folk to be vigilant and to participate on the local levels, ensuring that they're aware of what's happening, because there are some jurisdictions that could decide, 'You know, we're going to move from districts to at-large,'" she said.

Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the ruling could reshape local map-drawing. "It's often easiest to draw compact, reasonably configured districts in which racial-minority voters make up a population large enough to have a realistic chance of electing their candidates of choice," Li said. "You will increasingly see people at the local level assert that they, too, have various kinds of political interest and they want a certain political outcome, whether that is protecting existing incumbents or whether it is making sure that a school board has conservative tax policies," he said. "And the real danger now is you're going to see the white majority in these places reassert its primacy and really design maps to lock it in," he said.

The new limits come seven years after the conservative justices ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not reviewable by federal courts. Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has shifted its focus away from bringing lawsuits to enforce the voting rights of racial minorities. Last year, the department dropped multiple voting rights cases that had begun during the Biden administration, including one against an at-large voting system in Georgia's Houston County that a group of Black voters has since picked up. In a friend-of-the-court brief for the Callais case, the Justice Department argued that Section 2's protections against racial discrimination in redistricting are no longer constitutional. The Trump administration cheered the ruling.