Federal Court Delivers Major Win for Black Voters in Louisiana State Redistricting Battle

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling Thursday, striking down Louisiana’s state legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act.

The court agreed that the maps “packed” and “cracked” Black communities — concentrating some Black voters into a small number of districts and splitting others across multiple districts — in ways that unlawfully diluted their power to elect their preferred candidates under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

“The State’s challenge to the constitutionality of Section 2 is foreclosed by decades of binding precedent affirming Congress’s broad enforcement authority under the Fifteenth Amendment,” the court wrote. “The State’s assertion that Congress must periodically re-justify legislation passed under the Reconstruction Amendments finds no support in the constitutional text or case law.”

Louisiana had argued that conditions in the state changed enough to make race-conscious remedies unnecessary. 

The court flatly rejected that claim. 

“There is no legal basis for this proposition, and the State offers no evidence that conditions in Louisiana have changed in the year since Milligan was decided,” the court added. “In any event, this court, sitting en banc, and every other circuit to consider the issue have upheld the constitutionality of Section 2’s results test. We decline to depart from this settled and uniform precedent.”

With the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, Louisiana must now draw maps that better represent its Black population — about one-third of the state — and provide Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. 

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a separate case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for allegedly violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.