On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana enacted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander when drawing its 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district to rectify racial vote dilution. The landmark case, Louisiana v. Callais, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits “any voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”
The Weekly sat down with Moon Duchin to break down the decision and discuss how Chicago can continue the fight for fairer elections.
Moon Duchin is a professor of data science and computer science at the University of Chicago, where she runs the Data and Democracy Research Initiative. Her lab studies the science of healthy democracy and builds community mapping projects. Duchin has served as a frequent expert witness in redistricting cases, for the NAACP-LDF in Alabama, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Texas, and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Florida, for example. Duchin’s work has also figured prominently in recent debates about race and redistricting.
Ellie Gilbert-Bair: Briefly break down the Louisiana v. Callais decision and what it means for the Voting Rights Act.
Moon Duchin: The decision is the crowning achievement of a legal movement that turns civil rights logic on its head. The Civil War amendments (1860s) brought us formal equality, and the Civil Rights movement (1960s) brought us tools to protect racial minorities from prejudicial government action. Today, thinking about race is the new racism.
But this decision does a lot more than refuse to let policymakers think about race to get to fairness—the law of the land is now that political parties can seek to entrench power above all. Partisan gerrymandering now counts as a legitimate state interest, and if minority groups are excluded from representation, this court says that’s acceptable. To have a say in Louisiana or Tennessee might just be about picking your favorite Republican. And even more audaciously, the decision was dropped a few months early and fast-tracked after that. The most controversial decisions usually come in June, this month, so the April release was clearly designed to let states redo their maps in time for November elections.
How has the Voting Rights Act shaped voting and districting processes in Illinois, and Chicago, and on the South Side?
Chicago has been home to some famously funny-looking Congressional districts, like the notorious “earmuffs district”—the 4th, which was represented by Luis Gutiérrez for years, and now by Chuy García—called that because it had two bulbs (Pilsen and Humboldt Park) connected by a thin strip (a piece of Route 294). It was drawn up that way by civil rights groups who were trying to create a heavily Latino district while maintaining several heavily Black districts that needed to interlock while each one stayed connected. This is a textbook example of the mix of lofty goals and unintended consequences that redistricting often produces. The South Side itself is so heavily Black, though, that majority-Black districts are basically a certainty.
How might Louisiana v. Callais impact this?
Well, in 2023, city council districts in Boston were thrown out by a federal court because they were thought to have been tainted by councillors even <i>talking</i> about minority electoral opportunity while they drew the lines. But the thing about the current state of affairs in redistricting is that it’s unpredictable, and it’s not clear how far this new aggressiveness will go. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have lurched the court toward race reasoning that would have seemed absolutely topsy-turvy just a few years ago.
How can we identify gerrymandering? What are some problems we face when trying to fairly draw districts?
That’s a huge topic! But there have been major scientific advances in the last ten years, which I’m proud to be involved with. We can generate lots of alternative districts now, and we can control the principles we’re using to draw them. That lets us assess whether features of a districting plan are in the “normal range” for randomly drawn districts or whether they are unusual. But it’s really important not to get dazzled by algorithms and start thinking that whatever is blind must be fair. We can still have norms of fairness—like proportional representation, or strong regional representation, or competitive districts, or whatever we want to elevate—and just use randomized districts to help us get there.
There are just so many ways to draw districts that we’ll never find the best way, and we have to make sure we’re using our tools in the service of our values.
How can we move toward drawing better districts and holding fairer elections?
In this moment, when we are being barred from thinking about some kinds of fairness, I think we need to move toward considering election systems that don’t require careful control of the districting lines! There is a growing body of evidence that proportional ranked choice voting— where you have several people elected out of a district at a time, using ranked choice—leads to power-sharing between all kinds of voter groups without needing specialized district design to get there.
Ellie Gilbert-Bair is the Weekly’s Assistant Managing Editor.