Democrats and voting-rights organizations face a significantly harder legal battle in their challenge to Georgia’s redrawn congressional and state legislative maps following a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court judgment that had struck down Georgia’s 2021 maps, returning the case to U.S. District Judge Steve Jones for reconsideration.
The appeals court instructed Jones to apply the new legal framework established in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which substantially raised the bar for plaintiffs alleging racial discrimination in redistricting cases.
Under the Callais standard, evidence that a map weakened Black voters’ electoral influence is no longer sufficient on its own to win a legal challenge against a redrawn district.
Plaintiffs must now present evidence supporting a “strong inference” of intentional racial discrimination and must distinguish the effects of race from those of partisan political strategy.
That distinction carries particular weight in Georgia, where Black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, creating a significant and legally complicated overlap between racial identity and partisan affiliation.
Black voters and voting-rights organizations filed three lawsuits challenging the maps between December 2021 and January 2022, arguing that the districts diluted Black voting power in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Jones ruled in favor of the challengers in 2023 and ordered Georgia to create additional majority-Black districts, including one Congressional district, two state Senate districts and five state House districts.
Georgia subsequently enacted replacement maps that satisfied Jones’ order while preserving the Republican Party’s political advantage elsewhere, and those maps were used in the 2024 elections.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom, said he does not believe the challenge will survive the new legal test established by the Supreme Court.
“I don’t think a challenge will succeed because there is no evidence of current racial discrimination going on in the state legislature,” von Spakovsky said, arguing prior rulings had misread the law.
Von Spakovsky further argued that “partisan gerrymandering is constitutional and is not a violation of Section 2,” suggesting earlier rulings against Georgia had confused racial dilution with permissible partisan mapmaking.
“The Supreme Court in the Callais decision specifically said that a viable claim under Section 2 can only be shown if there is evidence of current racial discrimination, and judges must distinguish between racial and political bases for the way people vote,” he said.
Jones must now determine how to proceed with the remanded case, including whether plaintiffs may supplement the existing record with new statistical analyses or revised evidence addressing the Supreme Court’s updated requirements.
Georgia could argue that plaintiffs already received a full trial and that Jones should apply the Callais standard solely to the record already established, limiting the challengers’ ability to rebuild their case.
Whatever Jones decides is unlikely to alter Georgia’s congressional districts before the November 2026 midterm elections, as the state has already conducted primaries using the replacement districts drawn following the 2023 ruling.
