A federal judge Wednesday upheld DeSoto County, Mississippi’s local election map, which Black voters argued was drawn to suppress their political power.
The ruling is the latest sign that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision gutting the Voting Rights Act (VRA) is already making it all but impossible for voters to challenge discriminatory maps at any level.
Though Black residents make up nearly one-third of the county’s population, no Black candidate has been elected to a county office in at least 20 years.
Senior U.S. District Judge Glen H. Davidson, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, ruled that DeSoto County’s 2022 redistricting plan does not violate Section 2 of the VRA, which aims to bar maps that deny minority voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
The lawsuit, filed by the DeSoto County NAACP, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and two Black voters, challenged the districts used to elect 25 local offices, including the county’s Board of Supervisors, Board of Education, Election Commission, justice court judges and constables.
The plaintiffs argued that the map splits Black communities across districts and dilutes their voting power.
But Davidson, applying the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, found that the plaintiffs failed to clear the first stage of a Section 2 vote dilution case.
That threshold, known as the Gingles test, asks whether a minority community is large and compact enough to form a district, whether minority voters are politically cohesive and whether white voters usually vote as a bloc to defeat their preferred candidates.
After Callais, courts must now also ask whether plaintiffs used race to draw their proposed maps and whether voting patterns can be explained by party rather than race.
In DeSoto County, that change to how the law is interpreted proved decisive.
“Plaintiffs’ evidence is simply too little to carry the day on the second and third Gingles preconditions under the new Callais standard,” Davidson wrote.
The ruling shows how Callais is beginning to reshape redistricting litigation beyond congressional maps and into local offices that often have the most direct effect on voters’ daily lives, including county boards and local courts.
Section 2 was one of the last major federal tools left for minority voters after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system in 2013.
While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority claims Callais did not formally abolish Section 2, it rewrote the rules in a way that gives map drawers and local governments more room to defend maps that leave Black voters without meaningful representation.
The DeSoto County ruling is one of the clearest examples yet.
The court did not reach the broader question of whether, under the totality of the circumstances, Black voters have less opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Instead, Davidson stopped at the threshold because he found the plaintiffs had failed all three Gingles preconditions.
“The Court’s inquiry stops with the Plaintiffs’ failure on all three Gingles preconditions,” Davidson wrote. “As a result, Plaintiffs cannot prove their claims for vote dilution pursuant to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and judgment must be awarded to Defendants.”
The decision comes as parties in other state and local redistricting cases are fighting over Callais’ fallout.
In Louisiana, defendants in a challenge to East Baton Rouge Parish’s metro council map have argued Callais supports dismissal. In Georgia, Houston County officials have invoked the decision in a challenge to the county’s at-large method for electing commissioners.
The Mississippi ruling suggests that those arguments are no longer theoretical.
