Finally Friday Reads: The Chaos Times

“It’s now safe to go out to dinner in The Nation’s Capital!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The chaos surrounding voting rights continues to play out across many southern states. I’ve shared the craziness going on down here in Lousyana. Today’s news on voting rights and gerrymandering shenanigans was handled by judges in Virginia’s Supreme Court. It’s looking like Orange Caligula and his Republican enablers will be getting the Midterm Election chaos they seek. Our primary election is coming up in 8 days. Our U.S. Congressional representatives are not on the ballot as they should be.

Will the Virginia Supreme Court Decision impact more than just Virginia?  That seems to be the question being asked in the national conversation. David  A. Lieb  and Geoff Mulvihill report the story for the AP. “Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats’ redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win.” It’s difficult to believe that so much disruption can happen in modern times.

The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections.

The court ruled 4-3 that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.

Writing for the majority, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote that the legislature submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to voters “in an unprecedented manner.”

“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” he wrote.

Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn U.S. House map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere at the urging of President Donald Trump. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections.

Redistricting could change the House Map. This is the next question the article addresses.

Mid-decade redistricting so far has resulted in 14 more congressional seats that Republicans believe they could win and six more seats that Democrats think they could win, putting the GOP up by eight. But some of those seats could be competitive in the November election, making the results uncertain. Redistricting is still being litigated in several states.

There is a map showing the general changes that have occurred following the Supreme Court decision, which has disrupted the entire concept of gerrymandering and its illegality. The Guardian reports today on the situation in Tennessee, which could eliminate its one black majority Congressional seat. We worry about that here in Louisiana. “Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district. Move comes days after supreme court ruling weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering.” George Chidi has the analysis.

Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.

The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.

“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”

As Democratic lawmakers spoke, the house speaker directed state troopers to remove a section of the audience in the gallery, which had begun shouting.

Justin Jones, a state Democratic representative, described Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee house speaker, as the “grand wizard in chief”, and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag. Jones offered amendments to the bill, which the speaker ruled had been submitted in an untimely manner. Jones described that as a “Jim Crow process”.

The redistricting comes eight days after the supreme court’s landmark Callais v Landry decision, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act which had restrained state governments from drawing congressional districts that left Black voters at a political disadvantage.

Despite demands from Donald Trump for conservative states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, Tennessee had refrained from taking action before the court’s ruling. But Sexton said the redraw will “ensure the state’s representation in Washington reflects its conservative values”.

Khaya Himmelman has more information about the Virginia situation in Talking Points Memo. “Virginia State Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Redistricting Proposal.”

In a major loss for Democrats on Friday, the Virginia state Supreme Court rejected, in a 4-3 decision, the state’s recently approved redistricting proposal, which could have given Democrats four additional congressional seats, improving their chances of taking control of the U.S. House this year.

The proposal, which was introduced as a way to offset the impact of the Trump administration’s mid-cycle gerrymandering blitz, was narrowly approved by voters in a special election earlier this month.

The Supreme Court ruled that the process by which lawmakers moved forward the redistricting proposal violated the state’s constitution.

“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the state Supreme Court’s majority opinion read.

“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” it continued. “For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”

Election analysts underscored that this is a major victory for Republicans, though the political environment could still be a considerable drag on their midterms changes.

G. Elliott Morris has an analysis up today that breaks down the statistical assumptions the Supreme Court used.  This comes from his site Strength in Numbers. “The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA. The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after controlling for “controlling” racial polarization rather than partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test.” For a kid who hated her algebra classes, I sure live in the realm of statistical and econometric analysis now. It helps to understand the numbers, believe me.

The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.

That, more or less, is what the Court wrote when it invalidated the Voting Rights Act last week. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, the conservative majority told voting-rights plaintiffs they must now “control for party affiliation” before their evidence of racial bloc voting will count under Section 2.

That sounds like a neutral statistical fix, but in reality, it’s a bad control — an error called “conditioning on a mediator variable“ that would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101. The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!

This is important (not just a piece for nerds) because Republican legislatures are already moving ahead with new partisan and racial gerrymanders based on SCOTUS’s new theory. Tennessee passed a 9-0 GOP map this week that splits Memphis’s majority-Black and solidly Democratic 9th District into three majority-white, Republican-leaning seats. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session for May 20. Louisiana is losing at least one of its majority-Black districts. And Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina could be next. (On this week’s podcast, David and I recap these new gerrymandering efforts that are unfolding with unprecedented haste.)

This week’s Chart of the Week is: a simple table (and one causal diagram) that shows how the Court’s new test makes racial polarization vanish on paper, while it is very much still alive in real life.

This is the decision that will dilute the vote of New Orleans and every black citizen of Louisiana. Again, here’s the link to the Governor’s site announcing the decision to gerrymander the state prior to voting for our Congressional Representatives. “Governor Jeff Landry Suspends Only U.S. House Primary Elections Following Supreme Court Ruling.”  My mind boggles every time I read anything on this.

Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending Louisiana’s closed party primary elections only for offices of U.S. Representative in response to the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. EO attached.

“The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “Here in Louisiana, we’re proud to lead the nation on this charge. Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters. This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map. I would like to thank Attorney General Liz Murrill for her hard work throughout this process”

The ruling issued on April 29 found Louisiana’s current congressional district map, enacted under SB 8 during the 2024 First Extraordinary Session, to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively reinstates a lower court injunction prohibiting the state from conducting congressional elections under the invalidated map.

As a result, the state’s closed party primary elections for U.S. House seats, previously scheduled for May 16, 2026, and the second primary set for June 27, 2026, are suspended. Early voting for the May election was set to begin May 2. Other offices and ballot measures scheduled for May 16 will continue as planned. This suspension will only apply to the U.S. House races.

I do feel like I’ve been disenfranchised. And again, please remember the impact the SAVE Act will have on Women and Transexual individuals. Democracy Docket has this analysis of the Tennessee situation. “‘Jim Crow on steroids’: Tennessee gerrymander included nixing rule that voters must be notified about new districts.” The analysis is provided by Jacob Knutson.

In the aggressive congressional gerrymander they adopted Thursday, Tennessee Republicans also removed a provision in state law requiring the government to alert voters about changes to their designated polling places when electoral lines are redrawn.

Transparency groups and state lawmakers have warned that the change is likely to exacerbate voter confusion caused by state Republicans’ abrupt adoption of new congressional maps just months before the 2026 midterm elections.

One leading democracy advocate called it “Jim Crow on  steroids.”

Before Thursday, state law required county election commissions to “immediately” notify voters by mail when their polling place or precinct changed because of redistricting. Among other notices, alerts also had to be published in newspapers. The law was meant to ensure that voters know where to cast their ballots during early voting or on election day.

But in their bill repealing a five-decade prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, Republicans included an amendment that only requires county election commissions to post a notice about redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists.”

Under the repeal, which is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), the secretary of state also has to publish a notice, but mail and newspaper notices are no longer required to inform voters about changed boundaries.

Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (TCOG), a nonpartisan transparency group, said in a release Thursday that the change was likely meant to reduce costs, though she warned that the voting public will be harmed when it takes effect.

“When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” Fisher said.

Republicans had to repeal the prohibition on mid-decade redistricting before they pushed through their new congressional map, which cracks the state’s only majority-Black district between three separate districts.

Because of the new map, several local voting areas were shifted into new congressional districts. That means polling places likely changed for hundreds of voters across the state.

While debating the map in the Tennessee Senate Thursday, Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Democrat who represents Nashville, accused Republicans of intentionally misleading voters through the notice change.

“We’re not just redrawing the map. We’re making sure people don’t have to be told the map changed,” Campbell said.

Reacting to the notice change Thursday, Norman Ornstein, a prominent political scientist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “Jim Crow on steroids” in a social media post.

It’s clear to me that we really have something to worry about. We’re busy here in Greater New Orleans with actions. Please consider how you can help improve our country’s voting system.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?