How the Supreme Court’s ruling on voting rights could actually help Republicans

The Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act in Alabama last week, calling for a second majority-minority congressional district. Given that more than one-quarter of Alabama’s population is Black or African American, the court ruled that just one majority-minority district out of seven total districts did not provide adequate representation for them.  

Though the redrawn Alabama House map will likely lead to two Democratic representatives in Alabama in the next few election cycles, the impact on other states will likely cost Democrats seats in the future.

Here’s why.

To obtain a majority-minority district requires minority voters to be packed together in sufficient numbers to ensure they can choose their representation. Given that minority voters typically align themselves with Democratic candidates, these candidates overwhelmingly tend to win election in these districts. But by concentrating minority voters into a small number of districts, this prevents them from influencing outcomes in other districts.

Effectively, adding more majority-minority districts to a state increases minority representation in one area while decreasing their representation in other areas.

The Voting Rights Act is a legal form of gerrymandering, by packing minority voters together. Historically, any pushbacks to end the Voting Rights Act have come from Republicans, since they gain the gerrymandering advantage that the act legally implements. Gerrymandering, which is the process by which political maps are drawn to give one party the upper hand at the ballot box, effectively weakens democracy by allowing elected officials to pick their voters, rather than voters electing their representatives.

The tools of gerrymandering are packing and cracking. Packing concentrates voters with similar political bents into a small number of districts, whereas cracking disburses voters with similar political bents into a large number of districts. Though districts packed with minority voters will easily win their representative of choice, they are denied the ability to influence outcomes in other districts. The flip side of this occurs when minority voters are cracked across multiple districts so that cannot elect their own representation. Both these tools can be used to misalign representation by population with representation by district.

A good example of this is Illinois: 14 of the 17 (or 82 percent) House districts are held by Democrats, and 55 percent of the votes cast went to the Democratic nominee in last year’s governor’s race. The state has five majority-minority districts (as of 2022). Research shows that this number of majority-minority districts could have been preserved while providing equitable representation across the entire population.

The Supreme Court has incrementally weakened the act in recent years. The current ruling temporarily stops this trend and moves it in the reverse direction. It will influence future state court gerrymandering rulings and, ultimately, outcomes of elections.

Though the Supreme Court ruling will add a Democratic representative in Alabama, it will hurt Democrats in larger states where more majority-minority districts can be supported, giving Democrats more headwinds in other districts. State Republican-controlled mapping decisionmakers and commissions will be able to justify packing minorities even more tightly provided there are a sufficient number of majority-minority districts relative to their population proportion. The effect of such map-drawing may be more Republican candidates elected.

Gerrymandering continues to threaten our nation’s democratic process. The Supreme Court has consistently refused to make rulings on the issue, pushing such decisions down to state legislative bodies and courts. In many such cases, like North Carolina (which then overturned its own ruling) and Pennsylvania, the end results have led to new maps being drawn. Given the time and energy that such legislative processes have taken and used, creating a set of guidelines for map-drawing that every state can follow and adhere to would be worthwhile. Moreover, we should use independent commissions rather than partisan legislatures to make such decisions.

Given the capabilities of computer algorithms to draw political districts, incorporating the Voting Rights Act into such algorithms is a straightforward exercise in computer programming and modeling. The end results can also be easily verified by an independent commission. The question is whether those who draw political maps are willing to relinquish their map-drawing power to a computer.

Until such a time is reached, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alabama may end up helping Republicans when the next round of maps are drawn after the 2030 census.

Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A data scientist, his research group on computational redistricting is committed to bringing transparency to the redistricting process using optimization algorithms and artificial intelligence.