The supreme court's voting rights decision is a death knell for American democracy [View all]

The US was not a true democracy before the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision has essentially destroyed the law

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/30/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-ruling


‘It is difficult to say how many seats Democrats will lose in the coming Republican redistricting bonanza that the court’s decision will allow.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Is America a democracy? The term implies an equality of rights and dignity among citizens, a collective and uniform right of individuals to participate in self-government and to shape the laws that rule them. In that sense, the answer is no: though it has been a republic since its founding, America has only rarely been a true democracy, one where all citizens have the full right to vote and to have that vote counted.

Political scientists such as the University of Notre Dame’s Christine Wolbrecht have argued that America wasn’t really a democracy, not in the meaningful sense of the term, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law that formed the signature achievement of the civil rights movement and sought to end racial barriers to voting across the south when it was passed in 1965. If you accept that premise, you could say that the era of American democracy officially ended on Wednesday, when the supreme court finished its project of dismantling the VRA in its 6-3 decision in Louisiana v Callais. Whatever this country has become now, “democracy” does not describe it.

The decision, authored by Samuel Alito and joined by the Republican appointees Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, completes an effort that the court began in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder, in which the justices struck down the VRA’s section 5. Section 5 had required federal oversight of voting laws and districts adopted by states with a history of racial discrimination in voting; its absence has already led to greater difficulty for minority voters in Republican-controlled states to elect the representatives of their choice – usually Democrats.



In that 2013 decision – and in subsequent rulings that further weakened the Voting Rights Act over the intervening years – the court had claimed that section 5’s protections were no longer necessary to ensure minorities’ equal access to the franchise, because the law’s section 2, requiring that no state adopt a voting practice or district map that discriminated on the basis of race, was still standing. In his Callais opinion, seeking to preserve the pretext that the court was merely altering the application of the VRA’s section 2, rather than eliminating it entirely, Alito suggested that he was merely creating a new set of tests for the law. Do not believe this: section 2 is now effectively moot. The court has drawn new standards for plaintiffs to establish claims of illegal racial discrimination in voting that virtually no case will be able to meet. The Voting Right Act is dead.

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