Op-Eds
May 2, 2026
This op-ed by RepresentWomen's Cynthia Richie Terrell and Alana Persson, The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act. Women Will Pay the Price, was published in Ms.magazine in May 2026. Read an excerpt below.
This Wednesday, the Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to voting rights and to the women whose political representation is shaped by the structural safeguards this decision has now drastically narrowed.
In a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s majority struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, which had created a second majority-Black district in 2024. Although the decision did not formally strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Elena Kagan warned in her dissent that “the majority opinion had rendered the provision ‘all but a dead letter.’”
For four decades, Section 2 allowed courts to examine whether district lines produced discriminatory results—recognizing that intentional discrimination rarely announces itself. This week’s ruling reinstates an intent standard that Congress explicitly rejected in 1982 precisely because it was unworkable.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that a violation of Section 2 only occurs “when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
The statute remains on the books, but its practical force does not.
Kagan was not alone in this interpretation. She was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who co-authored the dissent.
Notably, all three justices who opposed the weakening of Section 2 were women—a fact that may say something about who most clearly sees what’s at stake when the structural protections of democratic participation are stripped away.
The data offers one answer as to why.
Read the complete article in Ms. magazine.
