The Callais Ruling Enabled Alabama and Other States to Racially Gerrymander Under Cover of Partisanship
Source: Donathan L. Brown. "Alabama revote: The Supreme Court’s Callais ruling wrought terrible damage.." August 14, 2026. slate.com
The Gist
The author argues that a recent Supreme Court ruling (Callais) made it much easier for states like Alabama to redraw voting districts in ways that hurt Black voters' political power, while letting officials claim they're just doing normal partisan politics to avoid legal challenges. The piece points to Alabama's chaotic, costly mid-election revote—and a nearly identical situation in Louisiana—as real-world proof that this legal loophole is already being exploited, with officials openly admitting their partisan goals while courts decline to intervene.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court's Callais decision has caused serious, tangible damage to voting rights by allowing states like Alabama to redraw congressional maps mid-election in ways that dilute Black voting power, while shielding themselves from legal accountability by labeling the maps 'partisan' rather than 'racial.'
Premises
- Alabama rewrote four of its seven congressional districts less than two weeks before its May primary, after mail voting had already begun, forcing a costly ($4.4 million) revote and voiding previously cast ballots.
- The revived map reduced the Black population share in Rep. Shomari Figures' district from about 47 percent to roughly 40 percent, and had previously been found by federal courts to be intentionally discriminatory toward Black voters.
- Officials and candidates who benefited from the new map openly stated partisan motives (e.g., wanting Republicans to 'regain the seat'), and Alabama's own legal defense characterized the map as partisan rather than racial to avoid VRA scrutiny.
- Because Rucho v. Common Cause makes partisan gerrymandering claims unreviewable in federal court while racial gerrymandering claims remain technically reviewable, states have strong incentive to frame racially discriminatory maps as merely partisan.
- In Alabama, voting is so racially polarized (Black voters ~92-93% for preferred candidates, white voters ~85-95% against) that sorting by party and sorting by race are functionally inseparable, making the 'partisan not racial' defense largely a legal fiction.
- Louisiana engaged in a nearly identical maneuver post-Callais, suspending an active primary and discarding ~45,000 already-cast ballots to redraw its map, showing this is a replicable strategy enabled by the ruling rather than an isolated incident.
- The confusion caused by changing rules mid-election (voters unsure of their district, assuming they'd already voted) is not an incidental side effect but the functional mechanism by which turnout—particularly among affected voters—gets suppressed.
Assumptions
- Callais meaningfully weakened the VRA's Section 2 protections against vote dilution, making such racial gerrymandering claims 'far harder to prove.'
- The stated partisan rationale for the map is either false or a legal cover that masks an underlying racial motive/effect.
- Reducing Black voting-age population percentage in a district constitutes a meaningful weakening of Black voters' electoral power ('fair representation').
- Courts and observers should treat the overlap between race and party in Alabama as evidence that partisan and racial gerrymandering are effectively the same phenomenon there.
- Voter confusion and suppressed turnout from a rushed revote are attributable to the map redraw enabled by Callais, not to other administrative or political factors.
- The similarity between Alabama's and Louisiana's post-Callais actions indicates a broader pattern rather than coincidence.