The redistricting picture shifted further in Republicans’ favor this week as the Fifth Circuit upheld Louisiana’s redrawn congressional map, the South Carolina governor called a special session to circumvent Republican Senate obstruction and pass a map that would likely make the delegation six to one Republican and endanger Jim Clyburn’s congressional seat, while Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves cancelled a planned special session to pursue similar remapping, drawing sharp criticism from Republicans in and outside the state.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to address media coverage of the underlying Supreme Court decision and the broader election integrity picture heading toward the midterms.
Von Spakovsky said the single most important thing his listeners need to understand about the Supreme Court’s Louisiana versus Callus decision is that the left-leaning media’s characterization of it as gutting the Voting Rights Act is completely and demonstrably false. He said the Court did not weaken the Voting Rights Act but returned it to its original intent and purpose, ending an abusive expansion of its application that had been building for decades. The 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibited intentional racial discrimination in the voting context, targeting the specific and documented practices by which Black Americans were being prevented from registering and kept out of polling places across the South. That discrimination ended decades ago. What Democrats subsequently did was expand the Act’s application in the redistricting context to claim that failing to guarantee the election of candidates preferred by Black voters constituted a dilution of their votes, a fundamentally different standard that required states to engineer outcomes rather than simply prohibit discrimination.
The Louisiana case illustrated the problem in stark terms. When the NAACP and allied plaintiffs went to court to compel Louisiana to create a second Black majority district, the evidence of racial discrimination they presented to the judge was sixty years old, drawn from the period before the Voting Rights Act was passed, because no current evidence of discrimination exists. The Supreme Court said the standard going forward requires proof of current discrimination in order to use race as a basis for drawing district lines. That standard, he said, sinks the Democrats’ entire redistricting strategy because the kind of pervasive official discrimination that once justified race-conscious remedies simply does not exist anywhere in the South today.
He acknowledged that characterizations like Hakeem Jeffries’s reference to an unprecedented assault on Black political representation and the ghost of the Confederacy afflicting the Supreme Court majority will be rinsed and repeated through the midterms, through 2028, and indefinitely afterward. He said the political calculation is obvious and will not change until it produces sufficient electoral punishment to make the messaging unprofitable.
On the Save America Act’s stalled status in the Senate, von Spakovsky recommended that states with Republican governments pursue their own versions of the legislation at the state level, acknowledging that existing federal case law would limit state-level proof of citizenship requirements to state elections rather than federal ones, but said solving half the problem is better than solving none of it. He noted the only thing that stopped New York City from implementing an ordinance allowing non-citizens, including illegal immigrants, to vote in city elections was the state’s own constitution, which the state’s highest court held the city ordinance violated. He said constitutional provisions are the last line of defense in blue states against policies that would otherwise allow open enrollment of non-citizens in the electorate.
His biggest concern heading into the midterms is non-citizen voter registration and participation in closely contested congressional races that could be decided by a handful of votes. He said the problem is not limited to illegal aliens but includes legal permanent residents and other non-citizens who fill out voter registration forms, check the box affirming United States citizenship, and are immediately registered because no state without a proof of citizenship requirement verifies the answer. The Biden administration’s four years of historically unprecedented immigration created a larger pool of non-citizens in the country than at any previous recorded period, and he said Democrats’ fierce opposition to the Save America Act reflects a calculation that non-citizen registration helps them win elections.
On the Trump administration’s handling of election integrity issues, he was broadly positive, noting that the Justice Department has prosecuted more non-citizens for registering and voting in the past six months than the Obama and Biden Justice Departments pursued across sixteen years combined, and expressing hope that publicizing those prosecutions will create deterrent effects and prompt non-citizens who know they are improperly registered to remove themselves from the rolls voluntarily.
On voter roll maintenance, he said roughly a dozen states have voluntarily provided their voter registration databases to the federal government for cross-referencing against Department of Homeland Security alien status records, which is one of the most effective tools for identifying improperly registered non-citizens. All the resistant states are blue, and courts have so far ruled in their favor in blocking federal access to their rolls. He said he hopes the issue eventually reaches the Supreme Court and produces a ruling requiring compliance under federal law, but acknowledged that even an optimistic legal timeline would not produce usable data before the midterm elections.