A former lawmaker from a red state warned that something ominous is hiding behind the latest “five-alarm fire” from the Supreme Court, according to a new report.
G.K. Butterfield Jr., a former Democratic representative from North Carolina, told The Atlantic recently that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is a “five-alarm fire” for voting rights. The ruling allowed states to gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes, even if there is a racially discriminatory effect from the move, which effectively gutted the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voters.
While the impact on the midterms has been well-covered, and rightfully so, Butterfield warned that there is something ominous lurking behind the Callais ruling. He warned that the ruling could be used to “silence the voices” of Black voters.
One way the ruling could do that is by eliminating local districts for local and county bodies, which would force minority candidates to run against the entire state rather than a single opponent. Butterfield compared that possible outcome to his father’s time in local office, which ended in the 1950s after North Carolina lawmakers threw out the ward system and replaced it with at-large districts.
“I was 10 years old, and I quickly realized that the rules can really determine the outcome of an election,” Butterfield Jr. told The Atlantic. “I came back home with the intention to file some type of voting-rights litigation against the city, kind of to avenge what had happened to my father.”
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