Will Supreme Court Gut Voting Rights Act & Weaken Electoral Power of Black Americans?

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The Supreme Court appears ready to strike down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, threatening the equal representation of Black voters, and potentially greenlighting Republican gerrymandering ahead of the 2026 midterm election. The case concerns Louisiana's six congressional districts, two of which are majority-Black, in approximate proportion to the Black population of the state. A previous map that gave Black voters only one district in which they were a majority was ruled to have violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last year. Now a group of conservative activists have brought the battle to the Supreme Court, challenging Section 2 itself. "The stakes of this case are enormous. This is a case about whether districts that represent all Americans fairly will remain possible in this country," says ACLU lawyer Megan Keenan, who is part of the legal team defending Louisiana's current congressional map. "We have a wretched history of racial discrimination in voting in this country," and "for 40 uninterrupted years, we have applied this rigorous, data-driven test to figure out when discrimination exists and how to stop it. That's the test that's at stake in this case."

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