Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling makes it harder to protect minority voting power and alters the landscape of future elections

Photo: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and others look on – August 6, 1965. Photo credit: Yoichi Okamoto / LBJ Library via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. Article by Sam D. Hayes. The Conversation – April 29, 2026.

In a major ruling that would permit weakening the voting power of minorities in the United States, the Supreme Court on April 29, 2026, struck down a Black-majority district in Louisiana’s congressional map as “an unconstitutional gerrymander” and altered the court’s interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservative majority argued that Louisiana had violated the law by drawing a second Black-majority district. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court was upholding a key part of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2, which prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified” in the act. […]

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