Newsroom

Edward Blum, president of the Project on Fair Representation, recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The High Court Strikes a Blow Against Racial Gerrymandering”.

You can read an exercept of the op-ed below:

“The Supreme Court has issued its long-awaited decision in Louisiana v. Callais, bringing much-needed clarity to one of the most confused and contradictory areas of American election law.

The justices held that Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw election districts to achieve racial proportionality. More important, the court reoriented voting-rights law toward its original constitutional purpose—preventing intentional racial discrimination. No longer will black and Hispanic voters be harvested out of multiracial neighborhoods and communities to create race-based districts.

For decades, voting-rights litigation drifted toward a dangerous assumption: that if election outcomes didn’t roughly mirror racial census percentages, something must be legally wrong. Courts and advocacy groups increasingly treated proportional representation as a requirement. States were pressured to sort citizens by race and draw majority-minority districts to hit demographic targets.

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The opinion also recognizes how much the country has changed since the first racial-gerrymandering cases were decided 40 years ago. The court noted that “vast social change” has occurred throughout the South and the nation as racial discrimination receded. The justices further acknowledged the emergence of robust two-party competition and the increasing sophistication of computer-generated districting maps.

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States that wish to reduce excessive partisan manipulation still possess many tools for reform. They can require compact and contiguous districts under state law, reduce unnecessary splitting of counties and neighborhoods, strengthen protections for local communities, and establish independent or bipartisan redistricting commissions.

But after Louisiana v. Callais, nobody can treat the Voting Rights Act as a mandate for racial proportionality. It is a safeguard against intentional racial discrimination. This restores the original meaning to this important law and moves the nation toward a genuinely colorblind system of election law.”