Supreme Court Faces New Decision in Major Voting Rights Case

The Supreme Court is facing a new decision on how to proceed in a Louisiana redistricting case just days after the justices released an opinion that critics said weakened the Voting Rights Act.

The court announced its decision in Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, ruling that a map drawn by the state was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district.

Attorneys for Phillip Callais and other respondents in the initial Supreme Court case submitted an application on Wednesday asking the court to immediately issue its judgment and send a certified copy to a Louisiana district court. Under court rules, the clerk does not send a copy of a judgment to a district court for at least 32 days from the decision's release, unless the court decides to expedite the process.

Attorneys for several plaintiffs in the initial case, excluding Louisiana, filed a response on Thursday opposing the application and requesting that the court grant them the opportunity to seek a rehearing. Louisiana took no position on the application.

"I think these requests are unusual, but this is not a usual case," Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and the president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Newsweek.

Rahmani said a district court cannot implement a higher court's ruling until the decision is sent to the lower court in a process called “issuing the mandate."

"There's some period of time because parties can ask for a rehearing, which is rarely granted, frankly, rarely requested at the Supreme Court level," Rahmani said.

Michael Gerhardt, the Burton Craige distinguished professor of jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina, said the application "is not unusual."

"It comes up often in contexts like these where the legislature is moving faster than the usual process for implementing the Supreme Court's order in the case. It is hard to say what the Supreme Court will do given that it did not include expediting its order be implanted to the district court in this case," Gerhardt told Newsweek.

The filings on both sides reference the state's primary election, which has since been suspended to give the state legislature time to draw a new map.

Attorneys for Callais and other respondents in the initial case said that "those 32 days could matter."

"Even if primary elections are pushed back, and the Legislature moves the election back as far as November 2026 (a return to Louisiana's pre-Act 640 primary system), time is still of the essence," the attorneys wrote.

Attorneys for several plaintiffs in the initial case said issuing the decision could interfere with the election, which goes against Supreme Court precedent.

"Enjoining the primary after ballots have already been cast would cause chaos in the election process and leave voters and candidates hopelessly confused, in clear violation of the principles this Court articulated in Purcell and subsequent decisions," the attorneys wrote.

The Supreme Court has not yet issued a decision on the application.

What Is Louisiana v. Callais?

The case resulted from Louisiana's response to the population changes disclosed by the 2020 census. The state needed to recalibrate its congressional districts because of the changes. In 2022, Louisiana enacted a new map called HB1.

The map, like its predecessor, included only one district in which Black voters were a majority of the voting-age population. After the map was enacted, lawsuits were filed in the Middle District of Louisiana alleging that the map violated the Voting Rights Act by "‘packing' large numbers of Black voters into a single majority-Black congressional district.”

The court ruled in Robinson v. Ardoin that HB1 likely violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to include a second majority-Black district and required the state to implement a new map.

After various legal proceedings, Louisiana enacted SB8, the map at the center of this Supreme Court case. On this map, District 6 connected Black populations from Baton Rouge and Lafayette (in the south-central region of the state) with the Black population in Shreveport (in the far northwest of the state).

A group of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit challenging SB8, alleging that District 6 was a racially gerrymandered district that violated the Equal Protection Clause. A district court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the state appealed to the Supreme Court.

The court’s majority opinion, which consisted entirely of conservative justices, was delivered by Justice Samuel Alito, who said compliance with the Voting Rights Act “could not justify the State's use of race-based redistricting here.”

“The State's attempt to satisfy the Middle District's ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion, which was joined by fellow liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan. She said that under the court’s decision, “a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens' voting power.”

“The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today's decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter-the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting-minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process,” Kagan wrote.

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This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 10:30 AM.