The Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Decision Is Worse Than You Think

In 2018, David Tyson Jr., an African American, sued Richardson Independent School District in Texas for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In the district’s 164-year history, Tyson was the only person of color ever to serve on the school board. Yet, at the time of the lawsuit, white students made up less than 30 percent of the district while Black and Hispanic students made up nearly 60 percent.

When Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it gave communities the tools to combat these kinds of racial harms. Section 2 of the act outlaws state and local governments from enacting voting rules that result in racial discrimination. One of the undersung aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais— for which there has been much hue and cry over the way it’s paved the path for right-wing state governments to draw majority-minority federal districts out of existence—is that it cuts away at this protection for local governments, as well, rendering it “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Kagan laments in her dissent.

While the media has focused on Callais ’s __ impact on Congress in the 2026 midterms, its darkest mark will be on local governments. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been most frequently applied to address and remedy local electoral practices, not state ones. Its use heralded diverse school boards and city councils where national minorities, by virtue of being local majorities, can govern.

Through this phenomenon, diversity develops twice over. First, through representational diversity and second, through institutional diversity. Minorities can see themselves represented on school boards, county commissions, and city councils. And they can harness that representation to institute local governments that do not look like state or national government. These more representative governments are more likely to become local laboratories willing to conduct policy experiments or try alternative governance approaches that the broader polity dismisses or ignores. This is why diversity at the level of individuals and institutions cultivates a rich democracy.Callais endangers these sites of local democracy by hollowing out Section 2 protections.

But back in 2018 when Tyson filed his lawsuit, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was still intact. We can look back in time to see its salutary effects. Tyson told a “tale of two districts,” where—unsurprisingly—a ceaselessly homogeneous school board had harmful consequences for the Richardson school district. Elementary schools where at least 70 percent of the students met grade level in two or more subjects were two-thirds white—and the vast majority were not economically disadvantaged. By contrast, the lowest-performing elementary schools were predominantly made up of Black, Latino, and economically disadvantaged students. Atop the startling peak of disparity was the 60-point achievement gap between the district’s highest-performing school, which was predominantly white, and its lowest-performing school, which was predominantly Latino.

These racial inequities did not go unnoticed by the Black and Latino voters of Richardson. And yet, Richardson’s school board remained persistently white for one reason: the district’s voting practices. While white students constituted a minority in the district’s schools, white voters still comprised a majority of the district’s population. These demographics, combined with an at-large, district-wide voting scheme where every voter in the district voted in every school board election, meant that minority voters would never succeed in electing a candidate of their choice. The minority vote would always be diluted against the white vote.

The school board—whether under the threat of ongoing litigation or by a genuine change of heart—agreed to end this pernicious status quo. In 2019, Richardson Independent School District settled. As part of the settlement, the district moved toward a single-member district voting model. Specifically, it instituted an electoral scheme that allows voters within a predefined border to elect a board member to represent them—similar to congressional districting. Two of the five single-member districts in Richardson were drawn to ensure that Black and Latino voters were the majority. Voters from these districts later elected Regina Harris, the first Black woman, and Debbie Rentería, the first Hispanic person, to serve on the school board.

Richardson was not alone in making this kind of change. In response to immigration and changing racial demographics, the late 2010s saw a spate of lawsuits across school boards in North Texas alleging violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Many of these districts settled and moved to electoral systems that gave voters of color greater voice in their representation. Grand Prairie Independent School District, which has a majority-Hispanic student population, gained two Hispanic seats on its previously all-white school board following one of these lawsuits. Likewise, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, a majority-Latino district, secured its first Hispanic board member in over 20 years.

The Callais decision __ threatens to upend this progress. Callais began with the 2020 census, which found that Louisiana’s Black population had grown to nearly one-third of the state’s population. Despite this shift in the racial makeup of the state, Louisiana legislators voted to keep the state’s congressional district the same as the decade prior—with five majority-white districts and one majority-Black district. After a Section 2 lawsuit was filed against the state, a federal district court mandated that Louisiana redraw the map with a second majority-Black district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. In response, Louisiana changed its map by moving Black voters to create two majority-minority districts to reflect the census results, which involved, by definition, looking at voters’ race. Plaintiffs—describing themselves as “non-African-American” voters—challenged this new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The Supreme Court agreed. In doing so, it raised the bar of what constitutes a Section 2 violation. Previously, to prove a violation of Section 2, a plaintiff needed to satisfy the three-part test established by the 1986 Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles to show that a voting rule has discriminatory effects on minority voters. Callais contorted that test. While the court stopped short of holding that only intentional racial discrimination violates Section 2, the new evidentiary demands it has placed on would-be plaintiffs create that requirement in practice. After Callais , a plaintiff would need to prove that the redistricting cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.__ Because voting preferences often correlate with race, controlling for party affiliation and proving racial intent is a near-impossible feat. In more concrete terms, Black voters tend to vote Democrat and white voters tend to vote Republican. If a Republican-led state legislature gerrymandered Black constituents out of a vote, it would be extremely challenging to attribute this action to racial animus as opposed to partisan gamesmanship.

Callais ’s logic applied downstream to local politics makes electoral changes—like the ones in Richardson—impossible to imagine. Many local governmental bodies, like school boards and city councils, employ the same at-large electoral system that Richardson used. Half of Section 2 cases were brought against at-large electoral systems to push them toward single-member districting in an effort to undilute minority voting power. Now these localities face less legal pressure to change. Even more discouraging, districts like Richardson might revert to electoral practices that disfavor minority voters—and foster the achievement gaps that Black and Latino voters aimed to fix by winning a seat at the table.

This will have devastating consequences for local politics. In the eight years since the Section 2 lawsuit was brought, Richardson has seen an increasingly diverse school board that added an African American Studies course for its high schoolers—even as Texas and national politics moved in a more conservative direction. While neighboring school districts descended into the culture wars and banned books about gender and race, the district took a more measured approach. Richardson is a parable with a simple lesson: When local governments look like the populations they govern, they can make policies that accurately reflect local preferences instead of parroting national or state politics. This makes Americans feel closer to the government that serves them most closely. Callais dismantles the legal mechanism that makes this form of democracy possible, and we are all worse off for it.