What Funders Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Latest Attack on Voting Rights

On May 12, we co-hosted a funder briefing with Latino Justice PRLDEF and the Multiracial Democracy Project at George Washington University Law School. Here's what came out of that conversation.

The Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is one of the most consequential blows to voting rights in a generation. By gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has handed states a roadmap to dilute the political power of communities of color and philanthropy cannot afford to treat it as a legal footnote.

The decision effectively rewrites the rules for how voting rights violations can be proven and does so in a way that makes it dramatically harder to challenge maps drawn to dilute Black and Latine votes. Within 13 days of the ruling, states across the Deep South were already redrawing districts. Tennessee eliminated a Black-majority district. Alabama moved to do the same. Louisiana halted its own primaries mid-process to start over. Florida signed new maps that splinter Black voters in the north-central part of the state. Virginia's Supreme Court threw out voter-approved maps entirely.

This is not a slow-moving threat. It is already happening.

What the Decision Actually Does

For decades, advocates could challenge racially discriminatory maps by showing that a voting system, even without proven intent, produced outcomes that diluted the power of voters of color. That's called disparate impact analysis, and it was the backbone of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

Callais largely eliminates that tool. Under the new standard, challengers must prove that legislators acted with intentional discriminatory purpose, a far higher bar that is much harder to meet in court. The decision also prohibits race from being considered when drawing remedial maps, while simultaneously requiring those maps to satisfy a checklist of "legitimate" state goals: partisan balance, incumbent protection, and more. The effect, as Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, is to render Section 2 "all but a dead letter."

What Advocates Are Doing About It

So many people have worked to defend and protect the Voting Rights Act. We believe philanthropy has a direct role in resourcing them.

State Voting Rights Acts. Eight to nine states have already enacted their own VRAs, creating independent legal grounds to challenge vote dilution that don't rely on the federal law the Supreme Court just gutted. A coalition including LatinoJustice PRLDEF and the NAACP LDF developed a model VRA that is now being updated to reflect the Callais restrictions. Advocates are also focused on making these laws as durable as possible by proposing race-neutral remedies where feasible and structuring language access and disability access provisions, which face less legal exposure, as anchors.

Proportional representation. This is a longer-term structural shift, but one that fundamentally changes the game. Rather than requiring voters of color to be geographically concentrated enough to constitute a majority district, proportional systems translate overall vote share into seat share. In Texas, where Latino voters make up almost 40% of the voting-age population but hold only about just under 30% of congressional seats, a proportional system could bring that delegation closer. The Multiracial Democracy Project at GW Law is working to advance proportional representation at the state and local levels, with city councils and county commissions first, then broader.

The local entry point. In states where statewide reform isn't politically viable right now, the local level is where the work starts. Cities and counties can adopt alternative election systems for local offices. It's a path for the infrastructure and precedents to be built.

What Philanthropy Should Be Thinking About

Several participants on the call raised the question of where to focus. The clearest answer that emerged: the ecosystem matters as much as any single investment.

Legal defense organizations are key, but they need to be in conversation with power-building organizations on the ground. Civic engagement, narrative work, policy infrastructure, and coalition capacity are all part of what makes legal strategy stick. Funding one without the others creates gaps that opponents will find.

One funder framed it well: the question isn't just which strategy to support, but whether the organizations you fund are connected to each other.

Stay in the Conversation

The Callais decision is one ruling in a sustained effort to reshape who holds power in this country. The response needs to be equally sustained and philanthropy is part of it.

• Download this messaging guide shared by an attendee on responding to Callais from the Metropolitan Group's Pro-Democracy Narrative Initiative
• Explore the NAACP LDF State VRA Toolkit
• Connect with LatinoJustice PRLDEF: [email protected] 
• Learn more about the Multiracial Democracy Project