Supreme Court Orders Reconsideration of Voting Rights Act Case

The Supreme Court has ordered lower courts to reconsider rulings in Voting Rights Act cases, including one involving Native American tribes in North Dakota, after recently weakening the law. The move impacts the ability of advocacy groups and voters to sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has been a key enforcement mechanism against discriminatory voting practices.

In a North Dakota case, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that only the federal government can sue to enforce the law, conflicting with decades of case law that allowed advocacy groups and individual voters to bring lawsuits. The Supreme Court blocked this ruling in July, temporarily allowing the tribes’ preferred voting maps to stay in place. However, the appeals court’s decision was cited in another case in Mississippi, which the Supreme Court also sent back for reconsideration on Monday.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, arguing that both rulings should have been reversed outright. The conservative majority’s decision comes after an April ruling that struck down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, making it much harder for future cases to succeed under the Voting Rights Act by limiting claims to maps intentionally designed to discriminate—a high standard.

The impact of these decisions is expected to significantly limit the enforcement power of the Voting Rights Act, making it more difficult for voting rights groups to challenge potentially discriminatory voting maps and laws.