By Molly Peach Matter
The United States leads the democratic world in voter suppression. No other democratic country has worked so hard to restrict the right to vote.
In the landmark voting rights case, Louisiana v. Callais, decided on April 29, the Supreme Court:
1) upended forty years of legal precedent, overruling its own voting rights jurisprudence from just three terms ago;
2) exposed the hypocrisy of a twenty-year Supreme Court judicial principle used to nullify voting rights victories; and
3) rewrote our present-day political reality — all in one fell swoop.
Joaquin G. Avila, the architect of the California Voting Rights Act and the Washington Voting Rights Act, taught me about the long game. As a voting rights attorney, I had to consider that a case could take three to ten years and that even if I won, the discriminatory voting practice could continue for years because of something called the Purcell principle.
In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Arizona voting law requiring photo identification violated the Constitution. After the district court stopped the illegal practice one month before Election Day, the Supreme Court intervened and stayed the decision to allow the unconstitutional law to continue. The Court argued that the voting train had left the station and due to the “imminence of the election and the inadequate time to resolve the factual disputes,” elections couldn’t be stopped. Thus, the Purcell principle was born: the idea that an unlawful election rule is sometimes better left in place than disrupted at the last minute.
For the past twenty years, voting rights attorneys were given no guidance on when an election would be “too close” to intervene. This stopped with Louisiana v. Callais.
Although the Guarantee Clause has been invoked in arguments about representative democracy, it has rarely, if ever, been used successfully to stop racially discriminatory election practices in their tracks. Voting rights attorneys who defend voters of color against racial discrimination must consider their case schedule (filing their complaint, discovery, dispositive motions, settlement attempts, trial, ruling, etc.) with the possibility that Purcell could nullify a victory. Even when a voting practice is found clearly unconstitutional, two election cycles may pass before the harm is stopped.
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Court continued to wield the Purcell principle. In Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee (2020), when in-person voting shifted to absentee ballot voting, a Wisconsin judge ordered a one-week grace period to administer an additional one million absentee ballots. But the Supreme Court, relying on Purcell, overturned Wisconsin’s voter accommodation and forced voters to risk their lives to cast their ballots. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented: “Either [the voters] will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety, or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own.”
In 2022, Purcell was invoked again in Merrill v. Milligan when Alabama packed Black voters into one congressional district to dilute their voting power. After seven days of testimony and one thousand pages of briefing, the district court ruled that the map was racially discriminatory. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s ruling on February 7, 2022 and allowed the 2022 primary and general elections to use the discriminatory map, relying on Purcell.
The upcoming Alabama elections scheduled for May 25 and November 8, respectively three to nine months out, were too close. To add salt to the wound, one year later, in Allen v. Milligan, the same litigation under a different caption, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had indeed violated the Voting Rights Act. The five justices found no error in the lower court’s opinion and Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.”
To reiterate, in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that Alabama’s congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black Alabamians.
The Supreme Court extended the Purcell principle again last summer, in Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens. After President Donald Trump urged Texas to gerrymander legislative districts to increase the likelihood of Republican success, a discriminatory law was signed on August 29, 2025, which immediately prompted a lawsuit.
The three-judge district court, over a nine-day hearing involving more than two dozen witnesses, thousands of exhibits, and a 3,000-page factual record, concluded in its 160-page decision that Texas had divided the districts along racial lines to create a new pro-Republican House map, violating the equal protection of Black and Latino voters.
On November 18, 2025, the district court ordered a preliminary injunction against the use of the racially gerrymandered districts, nearly 11 months before the 2026 midterm elections and four months before the primaries. However, three weeks later, the Supreme Court stayed this ruling, allowing Texas to use districts found clearly to be in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The Supreme Court said that the three-judge court violated Purcell “[by] improperly insert[ing] itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” In response and dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, stated, “[i]f Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election.”
That is now where we stand. The Purcell principle has been a procedural trick for conservative justices to delay justice. It has been used to frustrate the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
In Louisiana v. Callais, Louisiana was found in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act after it cracked the one majority-Black congressional district, dispersing Black voters into six majority-white districts so that their votes would be diluted by white-majority bloc voting. Louisiana’s cracking of a Black voter district was textbook vote dilution. And for the past forty years, voting rights attorneys could use Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act to prevent this type of disenfranchisement.
In 2024, Louisiana created a map to remedy its violation, drawing two majority-Black districts. In 2025, the Supreme Court granted cert to a lawsuit brought against the remedial map, pleading that race could not be used to redraw the districts because the remedy itself would be a “racial gerrymander.” Yes, it was fine for race to be analyzed when Louisiana cracked its majority-Black district and dispersed Black voters into multiple districts, diluting their power. But using race again would be unconstitutional. To follow this logic: racial analysis can be used to harm but cannot be used to heal.
As the elections were already underway, using a map that had been approved by the district court for over two years, the Supreme Court interfered — or using its own words, “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign…” — and changed Louisiana’s congressional elections with no mention of Purcell. Callais’s omission of Purcell exposed it for what it always was: pretext.
Conservative justices seized the opportunity to intervene, dismissing 20 years of Purcell precedent and 40 years of tried-and-tested congressional mandate and voting rights precedent — to stop the heart of the Voting Rights Act.
The fact that Purcell was never mentioned in Callais demonstrates that it was only used to usurp power from district courts when they ruled in favor of voters of color. Callais exposed how six of the nine justices would do whatever they could, by whatever rationale, to expand white voting power and diminish Black voting power. This is in direct opposition to the Voting Rights Act: that all voters have an opportunity to equally participate in the electoral process. Callais opened the floodgates for sweeping racial discrimination. States are now racing to see who can outdraw each other. As the midterm primaries wrap up, we are entering the most unprotected and volatile election season since post-Reconstruction.
Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as a wordsmithing exercise for justices who deny the past, are unable to see the present, and long for a future void of the sobering work of racial equality. For those of us who still envision a functioning multiracial democracy, we can lean on the dissents of Justice Kagan, Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Jackson. The jig is up: Purcell’s run is over, but the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution — and the Congressional power to enforce it — still stands.
Molly Peach Matter is the founder of Amend Law LLC, a community lawyering practice dedicated to advancing human and voting rights.
