Indiana’s GOP Shows Us the Future of Gerrymandering — And It’s Grim: A Conversation With Election Law Expert Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Indiana has rapidly become the latest flashpoint in the GOP’s national push to engineer aggressive mid-decade gerrymanders. Few states illustrate the immense costs to voters and how far lawmakers are willing to go to appease President Donald Trump.

Republican lawmakers initially resisted redistricting, but after weeks of pressure, threats and intimidation, that resistance collapsed and suddenly transformed into a full-scale effort to redraw the state’s congressional map. 

Their proposed plan, passed by the Indiana House, would eliminate the state’s two Democratic-leaning districts by splintering Indianapolis and the surrounding Marion County — home to a significant Black population — and giving the GOP a 9–0 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation.

The GOP’s accompanying legislation goes even further, restricting lower state courts from issuing orders that could block the new map and funneling any challenges straight to the Indiana Supreme Court on an expedited schedule.

To better understand what is unfolding in Indiana — how this unprecedented map was designed, what the court provisions mean and how a looming U.S. Supreme Court ruling could reshape the future of redistricting— Democracy Docket spoke with Professor Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, a leading election law scholar at Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law.

What follows is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What is happening in Indiana right now with this push for a 9–0 Republican congressional map? How can they achieve such an extreme map?

Firstly, what’s striking is how quickly Indiana Republicans went from “we’re not doing this” to a full-scale push for a 9–0 map that eliminates all democratic-leaning districts.

For a long time, they publicly insisted they didn’t have the votes or the desire to pursue a mid-decade redistricting. And then suddenly, after weeks of pressure from Trump and a wave of threats, harassment and even swatting incidents targeting lawmakers who opposed the plan, they did

The map itself is “incredible” in the sense that it’s aggressive but not surprising. If map makers can operate with no constraints from the Voting Rights Act, they can engineer almost anything. With today’s data and tools, creating a 9–0 partisan gerrymander isn’t hard for them. Their only real limit is “one person, one vote,” or equal population, and that is fairly easy to achieve.

What’s more troubling is the national context. This isn’t really about Indiana voters — it’s about delivering more U.S. House seats to the president. State senators have openly said the president summoned them to the Oval Office. Some refused, essentially saying “I don’t work for him,” but that tells you everything about where the pressure is coming from and how far outside normal democratic practice this process has moved.

Q: The redistricting bill also includes court provisions that ban temporary restraining orders (TROs), give “exclusive jurisdiction” to the Indiana Supreme Court and force challenges to be handled on a priority basis. What do these provisions actually try to do, and why do you think lawmakers added them?

When I read that passage, all that tells me is they just want to move it along as fast as possible. The Legislature doesn’t want the map getting gummed up in the courts. By banning TROs and cutting lower courts out of the review process, they’re trying to prevent any early order from stopping or slowing things down.

The goal is to get any challenge straight to the Indiana Supreme Court — quickly, and sometimes exclusively — and to ensure those appeals take priority over everything else. 

They don’t want a lower court to block it, and then they have to appeal. It takes time. But by the time they resolve it and it gets to the supreme court — then it’s too late for the court to allow the new map because it’s “too close to the next election.” 

Courts often refuse to change election rules when deadlines are approaching because of what’s known as the Purcell principle. Lawmakers will argue that candidates and voters need to know their districts. Therefore, the courts shouldn’t intervene. Accelerating the entire process ensures Republicans keep the upper hand. They just want it to move forward.

Q: Are these court provisions even legal or constitutional under Indiana law?

From what I can see, these provisions are probably legal because they’re not eliminating appeals entirely — they’re directing where and how those appeals happen.

The legislation prohibits TROs and then channels injunction appeals directly to the Indiana Supreme Court, except when a court refuses to grant or dissolve an injunction. If a lower court declares the bill unconstitutional, that ruling also goes straight to the Supreme Court. And everything covered by this section jumps the line and gets priority treatment.

Is it aggressive? Absolutely. Is it unusual? Yes. But legislatures have a fair amount of control over state-court procedure. What they’re doing is using that control to speed up the process as much as possible — not necessarily to block review altogether, but to structure the timing so that meaningful review becomes difficult.

Q: The proposed map splits Indianapolis and Marion County into four districts, breaking up a large and politically cohesive Black population. How does that raise racial gerrymandering concerns under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act?

GOP lawmakers have expressed that all they care about is a 9–0 map, and don’t care who lives in Marion County. They are looking for enough Republicans to form the districts and nothing else. They say this is about politics, not race.

But under a traditional Section 2 analysis, you simply could not split Indianapolis the way this map does. If you have a large enough minority community that is politically cohesive and faces racially polarized voting — and that’s exactly what you have in Marion County — Section 2 says those voters are entitled to an opportunity district.

By law, you could not fracture a community of interest like that. Section 2’s whole purpose is to prevent vote dilution. Splitting Indianapolis into four districts would dilute the vote of Indianapolis, particularly Black voters who also tend to vote Democratic.

But what’s striking in this map is that lawmakers are acting as though Section 2 doesn’t exist. Either they don’t care about it, or they expect — and many people do — that Section 2 won’t be around much longer. 

Q: How does the upcoming Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which centers on Section 2 of the VRA, factor into what Indiana lawmakers are doing?

Indiana is a preview of a world without Section 2. Everyone reading the tea leaves expects the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais to severely undermine or even eliminate Section 2 as we know it — just like the Court struck down Section 4(b) a decade ago, in Shelby County. Callais didn’t come out of nowhere. Commentators – myself included – have been forecasting this for years.

If Section 2 falls, there is one less guardrail than before and the 9–0 map becomes much easier to create. In a world where Section 2 is law, map makers could not likely split Marion County into four separate districts, or dilute the vote of Black voters in Northwest Indiana. 

Let me say this again, because the point is key: anytime a protected class under the VRA is large enough, politically cohesive, and the jurisdiction votes racially as a bloc, that protected class is entitled by law to a representative of their choice. We may think this is right or wrong, good policy or bad. But this is a decision Congress made in 1982 and Congress operationalized in the Gingles case in 1986. The US Supreme Court disagrees with those decisions and looks set to reverse them. 

And when it does, read the opinion carefully, and look specifically for the modern Court’s view about the scope of congressional powers under the Reconstruction Amendments.  You will not find a deep and thoughtful discussion on this point. The VRA was enacted under Congress’ 15th Amendment power to enforce the amendment. The Court is yet to offer a persuasive discussion about the original public meaning of that provision. I don’t expect Callais to do it either.

Indiana legislators are either ignoring the Voting Rights Act or simply assuming it’s about to disappear. And if they’re right, we’re entering a wild era of redistricting where minority voting strength is unprotected, courts can’t do much about it and partisan map-drawing has almost no limits.

More perniciously, it is hard to see where this ends. Lawmakers could redraw every year,  every two years — “we don’t like it, let’s do it again.” Nothing would stop them.