In 2023 C.E., the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling that preserved one of the most important protections in American voting rights law — and few saw it coming. The court sided with Black voters in Alabama who argued the state’s congressional map illegally diluted their political power, ordering the state to redraw its districts to give Black communities a fairer chance to elect candidates of their choice.
At a glance
- Alabama redistricting: Black residents make up about 27% of Alabama’s population but were confined to just one of seven congressional districts under the challenged map — the court required that to change.
- Voting Rights Act Section 2: The majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, affirmed that Section 2 of the VRA — which prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices — still applies fully to redistricting challenges.
- Broader legal ripple: The ruling immediately applied pressure on Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas, where similar redistricting maps had already been flagged by lower courts as likely VRA violations.
Why this ruling surprised people
Going into oral arguments in October 2022 C.E., voting rights advocates feared the worst. The court had already dismantled a key VRA protection in Shelby County v. Holder (2013 C.E.), stripping away the preclearance requirement that once forced states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their voting rules. A further rollback of Section 2 seemed plausible — even likely.
Instead, Roberts wrote the majority opinion alongside the three liberal justices, affirming that the legal test for racial vote dilution established in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986 C.E.) remained intact. The court explicitly declined what Roberts called a request to “recast our section 2 case law” in Alabama’s favor.
Lead plaintiff Evan Milligan, a Black voter from Alabama, called the decision a win for everyone. “We are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld what we knew to be true: that everyone deserves to have their vote matter and their voice heard,” he said.
What fair maps actually mean
Redistricting fights can seem like abstract procedural disputes over lines on a map. The consequences are anything but abstract.
When district lines pack minority voters into as few districts as possible — a tactic called “packing” — their influence beyond those districts effectively disappears. Research from the Brookings Institution has found that increased minority representation in legislative bodies tends to correlate with greater policy attention to equitable school funding, healthcare access, and economic mobility. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which litigated this case alongside other civil rights organizations, called the ruling “a win for multiracial democracy.”
The ruling also came with concrete downstream effects. Louisiana’s congressional map, separately flagged as discriminatory by a lower court, was also ordered redrawn. The National Redistricting Foundation noted that pending challenges in Georgia and Texas could benefit from the same precedent.
The limits of a single win
Advocates were clear-eyed about what one ruling can and cannot do. Alabama initially resisted the court’s order, drawing a new map that federal judges found still failed to comply — requiring further court intervention. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented how restrictive voting laws and aggressive gerrymanders continued spreading in other states even after the decision.
The ruling also does nothing to restore the preclearance protections lost in Shelby County — a gap voting rights lawyers say leaves many communities without the proactive safeguards the original VRA was built to provide. The fight over who gets counted, heard, and fairly represented in American democracy is far from over.
Still, for those who have spent decades litigating these cases, the decision represented something real. It demonstrated that courts can still serve as a meaningful venue for communities whose political voice has been deliberately narrowed — and that the core of the Voting Rights Act could hold even under pressure from a deeply conservative bench.
Read more
For more on this story, see: The Philadelphia Inquirer
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights win recognition ahead of COP30
- Renewables now make up nearly half of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on justice
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