Callais

Majority — Alito

Joined by: Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett

The majority held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, properly read, only imposes liability when the evidence supports a strong inference that a State intentionally drew district lines to give minority voters less opportunity to elect their preferred candidates because of their race — not merely because of partisan or other race-neutral factors. The Court reasoned that because the Fifteenth Amendment itself only prohibits intentional racial discrimination, Congress's enforcement power under that Amendment cannot extend to banning districting plans based solely on their racially disparate effects when a plausible race-neutral explanation exists. The majority updated the long-standing Gingles framework in three key ways: plaintiffs' illustrative maps must be drawn without using race and must satisfy all of the State's legitimate political goals; evidence of racially polarized voting must control for partisan affiliation to show that race — not party — explains the divide; and the "totality of circumstances" inquiry must focus on present-day evidence of intentional discrimination rather than historical discrimination or lingering social effects. Applying this updated framework, the Court found that the Robinson plaintiffs who originally sued Louisiana failed at every step — their illustrative maps did not protect all incumbents the State sought to shield, their polarized-voting evidence did not separate race from party, and their totality-of-circumstances evidence relied on history rather than current intentional discrimination. Because Section 2 did not actually require Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district, the State had no compelling interest to justify its race-based map, making SB8 an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent argued that the majority has effectively returned Section 2 to what it was before Congress amended it in 1982 — a law that requires proof of discriminatory intent, which Congress specifically and deliberately rejected. Justice Kagan wrote that Congress amended Section 2 precisely because the Court's prior decision in Mobile v. Bolden had made vote-dilution suits nearly impossible by requiring proof of intentional discrimination, and that the new "results" test Congress enacted was designed to make liability turn on the effects of a districting scheme, not the motives behind it. The dissent contended that the majority's new requirements — that plaintiffs' illustrative maps must satisfy all of a State's political goals, that racially polarized voting evidence must be stripped of partisan data, and that the totality inquiry must focus only on present-day intentional discrimination — will doom virtually all vote-dilution suits, because in most places where Section 2 still matters, racial identity and party preference are closely linked, and a State can always assert a partisan justification to shield its maps from scrutiny. The dissent further argued that the majority's constitutional reasoning is unprecedented: prior decisions, including Allen v. Milligan just three years ago, had squarely held that Congress has the power under the Fifteenth Amendment to ban voting practices based on their discriminatory effects, and that the Gingles framework was entitled to the highest form of stare decisis protection as a long-settled statutory interpretation that Congress had repeatedly left undisturbed. Justice Kagan warned that the ruling threatens to eliminate most majority-minority districts across the country, because any State wishing to crack a minority community's district need only announce a partisan gerrymander to immunize itself from Section 2 liability.