STATEMENT: Supreme Court’s Gutting of Voting Rights Act Part of Coordinated Assault on Democracy

April 29. 2026

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For Immediate Release
Apr 29, 2026

Media Contact
Nazirah Ahmad
[email protected]

Statement from Noreen Farrell, Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates, on SCOTUS decision to disenfranchise Black and Native voters

SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 – We are dismayed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision today imposing new burdens of proof that make it far harder to challenge  voting maps drawn to dilute Black votes.

The real-world consequences are immediate and severe, particularly for Black women and women of color who have been at the forefront of democratic participation and organizing.

Today’s decision represents a devastating blow to voting rights and an abandonment of our nation’s promise of equal political representation. By ignoring historical and ongoing discrimination, the Court has chosen ideology over documented and recorded instances of voting disenfranchisement based on race and ethnicity.

The Supreme Court struck a lower district court-ordered addition of a second majority-Black district in Louisiana after voters challenged 2022 Republican redistricting that diluted Black voting strength. The high court upheld a lower court ruling that found Louisiana mapmakers relied too heavily on race when they redrew the state’s voting boundaries to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Today’s ruling effectively guts a key component of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights law enacted nearly 60 years ago to prevent racial discrimination in voting. In reaching the decision, the majority imposed a new test that will have wide effects outside Louisiana. The Court’s test now requires plaintiffs challenging voting maps to show that legislators who drew the map were “motivated by a discriminatory purpose.”

The new test flies in the face of “Section 2’s clear text and design,” as noted by Justice Kagan, in a dissent joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. Justice Kagan wrote: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

Section 2 has been the primary tool for challenging discriminatory voting maps for over four decades. Striking it down leaves communities of color with sharply diminished legal recourse. It opens the door to a return of dilution and suppression of minority voting power through gerrymandering and other discriminatory electoral schemes like ‘packing and cracking.’ When women of color lose voting power, we lose champions for equal pay, affordable childcare, reproductive healthcare, and civil rights protections that make economic mobility possible.

This is a moment of reckoning. This decision is part of a coordinated assault on the constitutional protections that safeguard democracy itself. When the Court strips voting rights protections from Black Americans and Native Americans while an administration openly pursues authoritarian policies, we are witnessing the systematic dismantling of democratic guardrails. These are no longer warnings, but promises from this authoritarian administration.

We must act with clarity about what is at stake: the survival of representative democracy in this country.

To request an interview with Noreen Farrell, contact Nazirah Ahmad at [email protected] or 704-290-6869. 

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About Equal Rights Advocates

Equal Rights Advocates fights for gender justice in workplaces and schools across the country. Since 1974, they have been fighting on the front lines of social justice to protect and advance rights and opportunities for women, girls, and people of all gender identities through groundbreaking legal cases and bold legislation that sets the stage for the rest of the nation. www.equalrights.org