"If Your Vote Didn't Matter, They Wouldn't Work So Hard to Take It"
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We've been gone a few weeks. A study abroad trip to Belfast, then some back and forth to Louisiana for family stuff. So we're behind. This episode was actually planned over a month ago and life kept getting in the way. But the upside of being late is that we've gotten to watch what happened next, and what happened next is a lot.
Before we get into it, a quiz.
Who does the Constitution place final authority with in our nation? How old does the president have to be? If no candidate gets a majority of the electoral vote, who picks the president? How many congressional districts are in your state, and which one do you live in?
If you stumbled on a few of those, welcome to the club. Matthew has a PhD and he'd have failed the harder versions. And that's the point, because these aren't questions we made up. They're pulled from the voter literacy tests that many Southern states used in the 1960s to keep Black citizens away from the ballot box. Most white people couldn't have passed them either. They were never designed to be passed. They were designed to give a registrar an excuse to not let Black people vote.
We start there because none of what's happening now makes sense without it.
What Callais Actually Did
On April 29th, the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais. Justice Kagan, in her dissent, said the decision renders Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act "all but a dead letter." Section 2 is the part of the law that says you can't draw your maps to deny people the vote because of their race. For a long time it was the last real protection standing. Now it mostly isn't.
To get why that matters, you have to actually understand gerrymandering, and not just the cartoon version where the districts look funny.
The word goes back to 1812. A Massachusetts governor named Elbridge Gerry signed off on a district so twisted that a newspaper said it looked like a salamander and ran a cartoon calling it a "Gerry-mander." The name stuck. But the practice is older than that. Patrick Henry tried to redraw a district in 1788 to keep James Madison out of the first Congress. So this has been with us since the founders. It is not new.
There are two basic moves. Cracking splits a group of voters across a bunch of districts so they're a minority everywhere and can't win anything. Packing crams them into one or two districts where they win big, which wastes their votes and makes all the surrounding districts safer for the other side. Either way, the politicians are picking their voters instead of the voters picking their politicians.
Louisiana is one third Black. A third of six districts is two. So two majority-Black districts isn't generosity. It's just math. The Callais case helped knock one of those two back down to one.
We Have to Talk About Colfax
After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery, granted citizenship, and gave Black men the right to vote. And for a little while they did vote, and they got elected, and the white men who'd held power did not care for that one bit.
On Easter Sunday, April 13th, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, a white mob attacked a courthouse where Black men were defending the results of a contested election. (Carol Anderson lays this out in her book The Second, which is about the Second Amendment and how it was built on race.) The mob set the building on fire, fired cannons into it, and killed somewhere between 100 and 300 people. Sixty of them after they'd already surrendered.
Then it went to the Supreme Court, in a case called U.S. v. Cruikshank. And the Court ruled that the federal law passed to stop the Klan only applied to the state, not to private mobs. So according to the Court, a mob slaughtering Black citizens for defending an election hadn't violated any federal rights, because it technically wasn't the state of Louisiana doing the killing. The Constitution was no refuge for the people who needed it.
There's a monument in Colfax, by the way. The plaque calls it the "Colfax Riot" and says it "marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South." Hundreds of dead Black citizens, and the thing the monument chooses to mourn is the inconvenience to white rule.
We give you all of that because the road from Cruikshank to right now is not a metaphor. It's the same road. It took almost a hundred years, and Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to finally get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to actually enforce the 15th Amendment. What we're watching now is that protection getting peeled back a piece at a time.
The Part of the Ruling That Made Us Angry
In the majority opinion, Justice Alito wrote that discrimination that "occurred some time ago," showing up today as "present-day disparities," is entitled to "much less weight." In plain English: that was a long time ago, we're colorblind now, get over it.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a response to that decades before Alito wrote it. He said white people love to congratulate themselves on the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and announce that the problem is solved, which tells you they have never once had to live in this country as a Black person.
You don't get to spend a century building the disparity and then call it irrelevant because the worst of it happened before you were paying attention.
It's Already Happening Everywhere
This is not a someday problem. Since Callais came down: Louisiana suspended its House primary and signed a new map getting rid of the second majority-Black district. Alabama got permission to use a 2023 map that lower courts had already thrown out. Florida passed a new map the same day the decision dropped. Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia are all moving or hinting at it. Look at that list. It's the Deep South. We are not shocked, and you shouldn't be either.
Analyses from Fair Fight Action, Black Voters Matter, and NPR suggest this could eventually flip as many as nineteen majority-minority seats, and could hand white candidates up to fifteen House seats that are currently held by Black members of Congress. Kagan's dissent called this a level of racial revanchism not seen since the end of Reconstruction.
Here's the thing that should bother everyone. When you actually poll people on gerrymandering, they hate it across the board. An April 2026 poll found around 70 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats agree that states shouldn't be allowed to draw districts that intentionally favor one party. Seven out of ten people. And it happens anyway, because the people doing it don't have to care what you think.
So Can It Actually Be Fixed?
We'll be honest with you. There's no clean fix, and they all run into the same wall: any real solution requires the exact people who benefit from gerrymandering to voluntarily hand back that power. They are not going to do that.
For what it's worth, here's what's out there. Some states already use independent, non-politician commissions that take the legislature out of map-drawing entirely. You could ban the splitting of counties and cities, which is exactly what they've done to Memphis and Nashville to chop up the votes there. You could require neutral mathematical fairness standards. And the biggest fix, the one nobody in power will touch, is changing the voting system itself so we get more than two parties and actually have to build coalitions to govern.
(If you want to read more, Matthew recommends Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop by Lee Drutman and Tyranny of the Minority by Levitsky and Ziblatt.)
Where We Landed
Representative Terri Sewell, a Democrat from Alabama who grew up in Selma, said what best sums up the issue: "If your vote didn't matter, they wouldn't be working so hard to take it away."
That's really it. Nobody spends this kind of money and effort and legal firepower to water down a vote that doesn't count. The amount of work they're putting into quieting you is the proof of what your voice is worth.
As always, we're not lawyers and we're not historians. We're two people reading, digging, and trying to connect the dots, and sometimes getting the details a little tangled along the way. But we're paying attention. We'd ask you to do the same.
Go vote in your primaries. Go vote in your runoffs. Find out who's drawing your maps and why. And if you want a little solidarity while you do it, come see us at yallaintright.co.