Tennessee has carved up Memphis. Louisiana is scrapping a Black-held seat. Alabama is dusting off a map a court once flagged as intentionally discriminatory. South Carolina is eyeing another target.
The rush across the South reflects a seismic shift: the Supreme Court's decision to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has unleashed a wave of congressional redistricting designed to eliminate Democratic districts and dilute Black voting influence, happening at breakneck speed and in some cases while primary ballots are still being cast.
Tennessee Republicans already enacted a map that splits the majority-Black city of Memphis across three congressional districts, erasing the state's only Democrat in the House. Louisiana stands ready to eliminate one of its two Black Democratic seats. Alabama successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to let it use a map that a federal court previously found was deliberately drawn to discriminate against Black voters.
South Carolina's Republican governor is preparing to call a special legislative session to redraw the district held by Jim Clyburn, one of the most influential Black Democrats in Congress. GOP lawmakers had blocked this maneuver before.
The velocity and aggression of these moves are stunning. Louisiana and Alabama took the extraordinary step of canceling primary elections mid-vote. More than 42,000 ballots had already been cast in Louisiana when Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, scrapped the election entirely.
"Those ballots are discarded and those voters will vote again in November," Landry said in a 60 Minutes interview. When asked about voters upset by the cancellation, he offered a curt response: "If anybody has a grievance, take it to the United States supreme court."
Election experts said such cancellations are unprecedented in American history, absent natural disaster or emergency. The Congressional Black Caucus, which boasts 58 members at an all-time high, is bracing for significant losses. Democrats are exploring counteroffensive maps in states they control, including New York, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, though they face steeper legal obstacles than Republicans.
"This is a five-alarm fire for Black representation in the south," said Michael Li, a redistricting specialist at the Brennan Center for Justice. "The court has signaled it's going to be a redistricting wild west, and there will be no sheriff around."
The chaos has exposed a glaring inconsistency in the Supreme Court's own behavior. For decades, justices blocked lower court orders that threatened to disrupt elections deemed too close at hand, even when voting was months away. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that federal judges must not meddle near election day, as it causes "disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences."
Yet the same court allowed Alabama to implement a new map less than two weeks before a scheduled congressional primary, causing the state to reschedule the election. The court offered no public explanation for the reversal.
"You don't need a law degree to see how inconsistently the court is behaving in these cases," said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. "Consistency is bad enough, but now you have a court that has shown itself willing to step in, even when it knows the result of it stepping in is that votes are going to be thrown out."
Civil rights groups are fighting back. The ACLU sued Tennessee this week over its new map on constitutional grounds. Federal courts have been asked to block Alabama from using the 2023 map it previously deemed intentionally discriminatory. A conservative legal organization has even cited the Supreme Court's decision to challenge Illinois's state voting rights law, testing whether the ruling reaches beyond federal law.
Stuart Naifeh, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, painted a stark picture of what's at stake. "It's not rolling things back to where they were in 2010. It's rolling things back to where they were in 1975. The risk is that Black representation will disappear from the south and potentially other places too. And Latino representation as well."
Georgia and Mississippi have held off redrawing districts before this year's midterms, likely reserving that option for the 2028 cycle. Texas, Missouri, Florida, and North Carolina, which already added Republican districts in previous rounds, could redraw again as well.
Author James Rodriguez: "The Supreme Court has handed states a wrecking ball and is now watching them swing it. The excuse about protecting election integrity rings hollow when the same court ignores its own precedent to make that wrecking possible."
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