Last year, in my first blog post for UCS, I asked a question still on the minds of many Americans: “Do we still have a democracy?” Drawing on my previous work advocating for the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and my experience with the national NAACP as a policy analyst, I observed the relentless campaign to erode the VRA, the uptick in partisan gerrymandering, and the documented harm to racial and ethnic minority communities as a result increased voter suppression nationwide. I predicted further deterioration could come before reform.
Unfortunately, things got worse. Much, much worse.
In April, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky described the ruling as making Section 2 of the VRA “all but a dead letter.” Over 60 years of voter protection were stripped away. This was not a sudden decision but the result of decades of cases slowly dismantling voting protections. Let’s talk about what this means and what comes next.
What happened to the VRA
Let’s start by looking at Shelby County v. Holder, which I discussed in detail in my initial blog post. After that ruling, states could change voting laws without federal preclearance, opening the door to a wave of laws targeting communities in states with histories of Jim Crow-era discrimination. Callais delivered the final blow. Louisiana v Callais revolved around a Louisiana congressional map drawn to give Black voters meaningful representation (a map that itself was the result from a previous VRA-related court case, Robinson v Landry). In his Callais majority opinion, Justice Alito held that states cannot use race as the main factor in drawing districts, even when doing so is required to comply with Section 2 of the VRA. The court ruled that only proof of intentional racial discrimination, not disparate impact, would be a violation. It should be noted, as Justice Kagan noted in her dissent, proving discriminatory intent is “almost always impossible” since lawmakers rarely state their motives so explicitly. In fact, Congress amended the VRA in 1982 to clarify that discriminatory results, not just intent, should be considered.
The consequences of this ruling will be severe.
The history that led us here
Some state legislatures have already begun to redraw district maps and eliminate majority-minority districts free of the need for federal approval. Black voters’ influence can be reduced by breaking up communities and spreading their votes across multiple districts. Combined with the Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, which put partisan gerrymandering beyond federal court review, state legislatures now have nearly unlimited freedom to redraw maps for electoral advantage. Justice Alito’s decision actually encourages this, with his claims that states have the “prerogative to draw districts…to achieve partisan advantage,” and that maps designed for partisan outcomes are “constitutionally permissible” and “legitimate goals.” As Chemerinsky wrote, “If any one of these cases had come out differently, Louisiana v. Callais would not matter.”
The Callais ruling is not a case of the system failing to work as intended. Our nation was founded on unequal access, and while the VRA still exists, the Callais decision reduced what was once a beacon of hope to a shadow of its former self, realigning our voter laws with the US’s long history of disenfranchisement. Our winner-take-all voting system was always prone to this type of manipulation. This was merely the event that sent an already teetering system over the edge.
In our current system, the candidate winning the most votes wins 100% of that district. All others receive nothing. If your preferred candidate loses, you will have no one you voted for representing you, even if your candidate received 49% of the vote. This structural flaw is what makes gerrymandering so devastating. By breaking up majority-minority districts and spreading those voters across multiple districts, their votes and voice are effectively silenced. After Callais, partisan actors in the states can carry out this effort with almost no legal risk.
There is a systemic solution: Proportional Representation
In my career, I have spent years working on voting rights and democracy issues. More often than not, we were playing defense against the latest attack, relying on the VRA to protect multi-racial democracy. That status quo is gone. The Callais decision demands bigger thinking.
That bigger thinking should include adopting proportional representation (PR), which has been proposed for years by organizations like FairVote, Protect Democracy, and New America. Under PR, districts would have several seats and parties would obtain seats based on their share of the vote. If Republicans received a third of the votes, they get a third of the seats. Voters would generally end up with at least one representative who actually shares their values. PR is already being used in a few parts of the U.S., including Portland, Oregon for all city officials; Cambridge, Massachusetts for its city council; and Minneapolis, Minnesota and Eastpointe, Michigan for local offices. By electing multiple officials from a district, PR is a system that increases fairness and makes it far more difficult, if not impossible, to gerrymander voters out of their voice.
It is worth noting that, across the globe, PR is the dominant electoral system, while the US’s “first past the post,” winner-take-all system has long been the exception. Our democratic process once made our nation unique, but the structures we operate within have instead led to deep and entrenched in inequality across racial and economic levels.
Protect Democracy found that, with lower thresholds to win each seat, the tactics that make gerrymandering effective under the winner-take-all system stop working. And as Eastpointe, Michigan and Newburgh, New York found, minority representation improves too, without requiring race-conscious line-drawing that Justice Alito claimed, in his Callais opinion, made the Louisiana map unconstitutional. Research also shows PR reduces polarization by producing multi-party coalitions and increases community engagement by making more elections genuinely competitive. It’s also worth noting that PR tends to encourage more political parties and greater competition, ultimately leading to less two-sided polarization and more opportunity for compromise.
Science, facts, and electoral reform
In 2022, over 200 political scientists wrote in a letter to Congress that our winner-take-all system “is fundamentally broken.” Political sociologist Larry Diamond wrote that winner-take-all systems are particularly ill-suited to countries with “deep ethnic, regional, religious, or other emotional and polarizing divisions.” Those observations describe where we are today. Despite what Justice Alito insists, race and partisanship are closely connected in the U.S.
Research has found that countries that use proportional representation tend to elect legislatures that better reflect their constituencies’ values, and are more likely to adopt policies that the majority of citizens want. Additionally, studies show that these governments are more likely to adopt stronger environmental protections and to invest more in education and infrastructure, as summarized by Fair Vote Canada in their review of research on proportional representation’s outcomes.
None of those arguments are partisan. In fact, they point to structural problems that, if addressed, would benefit all Americans. I have sat through enough meetings about how to patch the VRA after another protection is stripped away. The real question we should be asking is how to build a voting system that works for everyone.
What we can do
I won’t sugar coat the situation. All of this is bad.
The names behind the VRA’s passage—including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Clarence Mitchell Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Hosea Williams, along with other known and unknown names—worked countless hours and risked their lives for those protections. The disproportionate racial impact of this decision will be real and lasting. But this is not the time to be or feel hopeless. Now more than ever is the time for what the late, great John Lewis called “good trouble.”
First, efforts to restore the Voting Rights Act must continue with renewed intensity. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 14) must stay on the agenda, pass both chambers, and be enacted.
Second, we should support state and local proportional representation efforts. As I noted earlier, several cities have already implemented ranked-choice voting and other reforms. These efforts deserve renewed attention in the wake of the Callais decision.
Third, scientists and researchers need to stay engaged. Data, evidence, and public analysis of how maps and electoral rules affect real communities are essential accountability tools. Even when courts won’t act, the public needs to understand what is happening and why. Science also has a role to play in supporting the transition to proportional representation. There are different approaches that can advance a more proportional system, and communities deserve to have a say in which system is adopted. That is why UCS is doing this work in collaboration and partnership with democracy experts and local communities. Through statistical modeling and other research methods, scientists can demonstrate the effectiveness of different approaches that communities can consider based on their local values and needs.
This week marks Juneteenth, a long-running celebration of Black liberation and Black participation in public life. We can’t let the shadow of decisions like Callais halt the progress we’ve made.
This road forward will not be easy, but protecting democracy, working for civil rights and fighting against authoritarianism never is. The VRA’s passage in 1965 because millions of Americans refused to accept an unequitable and unequal democracy. That is still the standard we are fighting for, and it is still worth fighting for.