Draw The Line
The Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais gutted the Voting Rights Act and rewrote the rules of American democracy. Draw the Line spends ten episodes telling the inside story of Louisiana’s fight over power, maps, and who gets left off them. As goes Louisiana, so goes the rest of the country. Who's fighting for your vote?
Draw The Line
The lines we draw
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
On a clear March morning, hundreds of Louisianans rally at the State Capitol to defend the right to vote. Weeks later, the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais guts the Voting Rights Act — declaring the court's own remedy for racial discrimination unconstitutional. In the premiere episode of Draw the Line, host Ellen McGirt travels to Baton Rouge to meet the organizers, legal experts, and everyday citizens on the front lines of the fight against gerrymandering and traces how a dispute over one congressional district became a battle for the future of American democracy. Because every district line is a design decision — and every decision is about who gets power.
It's March 18th, 2026. Early in the morning at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge, the skies are blue, temperatures are comfortable, and it's the perfect day to pass with friends, as the locals like to say. But these friends are on a mission. Louisianians have been traveling across the state to advocate for their most fundamental democratic rights as Americans. The right to vote. Hundreds of people start to arrive. By car, by the busload. A whole mess of them, you could say. Certainly more than you can shake a stick at. And there aren't. With detailed issue briefs, legislator schedules. They're motivated by what feels like our defining identity as a nation: the inherent right for anyone to challenge the powerful.
SPEAKER_05We're here today because democracy must be protected. It takes action.
SPEAKER_02This is our time to make our ancestors proud. Let's pass the Louisiana Voting Rights Act, not just for us, but for our children and our future generations.
SPEAKER_16People here are rallying in support of a state-level version of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that prohibits racial discrimination in the electoral process. In Louisiana, the federal version of the VRA has done some serious heavy lifting to protect minorities against threats like gerrymandering. So they're here fighting the good fight in the spirit of the civil rights activists before them.
SPEAKER_05Voting is not a privilege, and it's not a favor, it's a fundamental right. And when a right is fundamental, it must be protected.
SPEAKER_07When we can stand together, we can do it in the world.
SPEAKER_16Their ancestors overcame centuries of brutal, deeply ingrained racism to get the Federal Voting Rights Act passed. And when the VRA was written as law, it represented a monumental moral choice by the population, one which has in many ways defined what we think of as a modern America.
SPEAKER_06When I say people, you say time or people.
SPEAKER_05The thing that we know is that even when a bill doesn't pass, what it does do is that it draws a line.
SPEAKER_12Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson join, dissenting. The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today's decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the states where that law continues to matter, the states still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting, minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process. The decision here is about Louisiana's District 6. But so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the South, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long. If other states follow Louisiana's lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the court's decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.
SPEAKER_16Every district line is a design decision, and every decision is about who gets power. I'm Ellen McGert, and this is Draw the Line, a show about how the fight over a line on a map ended up invalidating one of the most consequential laws in American history. Over 10 episodes will tell the strange, tangled story of voting rights in America, explore the history of an embattled and beloved state, and meet the people fighting day in and day out for a fair democracy. So, let's start with this. Politics in Louisiana is complicated. Louisiana v. Calais did not start out as a federal voting rights case, but it was quickly used as a battering ram against the way voting districts are drawn across the country. In 2022, the state legislature passed an electoral map that was drawn with only one majority black congressional district out of the state's six. The single district map failed to give minority voters equal access to the voting process, exactly the kind of thing the Voting Rights Act was designed to protect against and remedy. The map was challenged and the fight continued. That's politics.
SPEAKER_14The Voting Rights Act in 1965 is really this like crown jewel of the civil rights movement. Because what the country was doing was just trying to constantly narrow and find loopholes to be able to pick apart the 14th Amendment and to pick apart the 15th Amendment. The Voting Rights Act is designed in a very nuanced way to say it doesn't matter how much you tinker, it doesn't matter how much you say I'm not a person, or you say separate but equal, or you say state violence versus individual violence. All of those things are baked into the formula.
SPEAKER_16That's why it's such an important test. That's Alana Odams, Executive Director of Louisiana's ACLU. You'll be hearing a lot more from her in this series, along with many more experts and advocates. That crown jewel she talked about has been an incredibly useful tool, and not just in the South. States like New York, New Hampshire, South Dakota, California, and Michigan have all been subject to VRA oversight and remedies. It was hard-won justice, and it worked. Here are law professors Atiba Ellis and Leah Littman.
SPEAKER_00In my view, it's fair to say that America did not truly become a multiracial democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act because it was ultimately the example of what the basic standards of fairness ought to be. And it provided a remedy when discriminatory devices were reinvented in different guises in order to either prevent voting by minorities who are vulnerable in the political process or to wash away their power. And it was a promise written in 1870 in the 15th Amendment, betrayed by the turn of the 20th century, but then fulfilled again by act of Congress.
SPEAKER_15So Congress has repeatedly reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. The most recent one was in 2006. In 1982, Congress responded to a Supreme Court decision that had interpreted the Voting Rights Act to mean only state laws or policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race violate the law. And that's a big problem because it allows a ton of racial discrimination to slip under the radar. Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to say laws or policies that have the effect of disadvantaging voters on the basis of race, those two presumptively violate the Voting Rights Act. And that included so-called redistricting decisions because they have the effect of diluting or suppressing the political power of voters of color.
SPEAKER_16That would be gerrymandering. To prove that a district was racially gerrymandered was never as simple as just saying, hey, that's not fair. The law includes intricately constructed tests that the district must pass in order to comply. Advocates felt like this one looked like a duck and quacked like a duck. So advocates did what advocates do. They took them to court.
SPEAKER_14So the Robinson plaintiffs are black people who realize that, wait, the state legislature is going to draw the maps for Congress and for the state House and Senate in the exact same way despite thousands of additional black people that are now in Louisiana in certain jurisdictions. The federal courts say, yes, you're right, you've met this very, very complicated test.
SPEAKER_16Your vote is being diluted. It took four years to grind through the courts, including multiple attempts to add a second majority black district in the legislature. But in 2024, Louisiana's electoral map was again redrawn with a second predominantly black district. Now, this was only after the appellate court threatened to draw a map for them, but still, it happened. The new district was Louisiana's 6th, and it stretched like a sash across the state from Northwest Cadow Parish near Shreeport to include parts of Baton Rouge, the state's capital. It also follows part of the Red River, an essential watershed area rich in Civil War history, biodiversity, and folk culture. This area is home to a patchwork of distinctive musical traditions you probably know, like Cajun, Zydeco, and something called swamp pop, what has come to feel to the rest of us as quintessential Louisiana Americana. But just 12 days after this new electoral map was signed into law, a group that self-identified as non-African American voters again challenged it. The suit, Calais V. Landry, also claimed racial gerrymandering in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants citizens equal protection under the law. It's been interpreted by many conservatives to mean that race cannot be the main consideration in legislation. Here's Professor Rick Haysen.
SPEAKER_01They're saying you, in drawing this line, you actually violated another federal rule. It's under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Basically says this when you draw your districts, you cannot make race the predominant factor in drawing your lines. Race can't be the top thing that you're doing.
SPEAKER_16A federal district court based in Shreeport agreed with the non-African American voters and struck down the map with two majority black districts. So again, voting rights groups in Louisiana jumped to defend the map and did what they do. Back to court. And the Calais case wound its way up to the Supreme Court.
SPEAKER_01The question was, did race predominate, or was it just politics as usual? That's a question that the Supreme Court has decided in many cases since they recognized this racial gerrymandering plan. The Supreme Court said, well, assume that race was the predominant factor. Does the Voting Rights Act require drawing that second district? And if it does, does that render the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional? So this was a huge curveball from the Supreme Court. The case was not really about the question of whether the Voting Rights Act is itself unconstitutional.
SPEAKER_16Now comes the whiplash. On April 29th, 2026, in a 6-3 ruling cutting along ideological lines, the conservative majority declared Louisiana's newest map unconstitutional. To be clear, this was just three years after requiring Alabama to draw the same kind of second majority black district, and after letting Louisiana use the very map it was now striking down in the 2024 election, suddenly the U.S. courts were saying their own remedy to a voting rights act violation was in fact illegal.
SPEAKER_15The argument in Louisiana versus Calais is that efforts to draw districts that attempt to fix a Voting Rights Act violation by ensuring that voters of color are represented, that's the real racism. That's the unconstitutional discrimination. But drawing a set of districts that just so happens to result in white voters having all the political power, well, that's just politics.
SPEAKER_01This is very much of a piece of the current conservative justices on the court believing that the 14th Amendment requires a colorblind constitution. That is, you know, we have to take race out of the equation when the government does actions. Well, if you go back to the 14th Amendment, Congress passed race-conscious laws all the time to try to benefit former slaves. And so if you really want to be an originalist, you ask why do we have these Reconstruction Amendments in the first place? It was to empower black voters who were disenfranchised. It is a cynical play to, I think, benefit the white Republican increasing minority in many areas against an emerging multiracial United States.
SPEAKER_16Ashley Shelton, Power Coalition's founder and CEO.
SPEAKER_19Since 2022, there have been so many fights. We've won in court and lost in court and won in court and lost in court. Then Calais challenged the Voting Rights Act, literally saying the Voting Rights Act itself violated the Constitution. And it's particularly cruel because the whole point of the 14th and 15th Amendment was to protect minority communities.
SPEAKER_16Section two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any voting practice that discriminates based on race, was hollowed out entirely. On paper, section two survives. In practice, the court made it nearly impossible to prove racial discrimination claims, paving the way for Louisiana and other conservative majority states to redraw their maps without those deliberate protections. This is when a local issue became everybody's problem.
SPEAKER_00The heart of the reasoning in Calais, that you have to have proof of a conscious intent to discriminate in order to affect a Section 2 claim. Any legislature with common sense would know not to say the quiet part out loud. They'd know not to say, no, we don't like these black voters. But in a world where the questions then come down to are we trying to disenfranchise black voters or are we trying to disenfranchise Democrats? The difficulty in telling the difference between the two became such a burden with Calais by creating an intentionality standard for racial discrimination. The tools that were available to at least show that the effects also had racially discriminatory effects have been annihilated.
SPEAKER_20States are actively taking advantage of the fact that it will be so hard now to prove these things, they're just gonna go do those things, take these actions to undermine minority voting rights, with the understanding of the courts are not going to step in. This is not a good situation to be in. The end game here is that we're gonna end up with far fewer congressional districts, legislative districts, and county commission districts, school board districts, all down the line, where members of protected minority classes are going to be able to elect candidates of their choice. By the time we get to 2032, after the next census and the next redraw of all of our legislative districts, I think we are going to be at a place back to the levels seen before the 1980s in terms of minority representation.
SPEAKER_16As I sit and think of fixing cotton fields and this bombshell decision has dealt what looks to be a death blow to not just the Voting Rights Act, but to the whole idea of a fair and free democracy in the United States. But sadly, it felt almost inevitable.
SPEAKER_03You can hear those darkest singing soft and low.
SPEAKER_16That's Jimmy Davis, one of the earliest stars to emerge from Louisiana's extraordinary country tradition. You know that song You Are My Sunshine? That was him. But most Louisianians know him as just another eccentric governor. Twice, in fact, from 1944 to 1948, and then again from 1960 to 1964. Louisiana is a place where Jim Crow moved in, set up shop, and never left town. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed-race New Orleans shoemaker, boarded the East Louisiana Railroad, took a seat in the whites-only car, and refused to leave it. He was arrested. He later sued. And in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court found that segregation was constitutional under You Got It, the 14th Amendment. The doctrine it created is familiar, separate but equal. But until the Civil Rights Movement, things remained separate and anything but equal.
SPEAKER_03And at twilight in the evening. So soft and alone.
SPEAKER_06It's about whether our democracy reflects the people or chooses to manipulate. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to stop Jim Crow law. But the current administration is attempting to roll that progress back strategically and deliberately.
SPEAKER_16And so, on a clear day in March, a group organized by a grassroots nonprofit called the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice rallies in front of the Louisiana State Capitol, knowing that soon the Supreme Court could use a case grown locally in their own state to further weaken voting rights in America.
SPEAKER_06This building was not built for the oligarchs or for those who think that they are in power, but it was built for the people by the people.
SPEAKER_16They gather in front of the very imposing state house that another eccentric former governor, Huey Long, had built in 1932. It's the tallest in the country, many in the crowd proudly tell me. And where his body is buried on the lawn. He's still invoked in Louisiana, sometimes with reverence, but more often not. He built roads, hospitals, and schools for people who had been ignored for generations, while also running the state as a machine of corruption that answered only to him. He was definitely avant garde. Historian David Kennedy wrote that Long's regime in Louisiana was the closest. Thing to a dictatorship America has ever known. Same with a newspaper man at the time named Hotting Carter, who truly despised him, called Long the first true dictator to come from American soil. He was even the model for fictional fascists in popular literature of the day, like Buzz Windrip in Sinclair Lewis's novel, It Can't Happen Here, about a populist politician who becomes an authoritarian dictator after promising drastic economic reforms and a return to patriotism. Anyway, in the end, someone shot that man right here at the Capitol. Today, Louisiana's Capitol is undergoing renovation with scaffolding inside and out. And it is in the spirit of redesign that coalition members and volunteers come to exercise the ghosts of Louisiana's past.
SPEAKER_17Protecting democracy should not require extraordinary efforts every single time. It should be built into the law so that communities don't have to fight the same battles over and over again.
SPEAKER_16They were a party to the Calais case and plaintiffs in the initial Robinson case and plenty of the other important local cases that preceded it. They've spent the better part of 10 years fighting for voting access amid constant political wrangling and flagging voter spirit. Their work, as a nonpartisan voting rights organization, focuses on people and their right to be heard about the problems they face. So they care about a lot of things: criminal justice, environmental justice, housing, early childhood education, reproductive justice, which in Louisiana, given the state's issues with maternal mortality, they also frame as the right to survive childbirth. But voting rights is what binds it all together.
SPEAKER_00Don't mess with it no more.
SPEAKER_16And so they spend a lot of time in court.
SPEAKER_13It was just us. Because the court was simply asking a question about Louisiana. Then the court came back and said, Well, let's talk about the entire Voting Rights Act. And that's when everybody's like, Whoa, is everything unconstitutional? Typically a voting rights issue that if you go in the history of this country doesn't start off with this major question. It starts very narrowly that then broadens its implications. I mean, you can see their strategy is from those who have opposed civil rights and voting rights. They are typically the same law firm. They kind of follow the same path and they will go to a community and find that one narrow place. Why do they come to the South a lot? Well, because the South goes to the Fifth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit is a very conservative-minded circuit court of appeals that then can elevate fast to the Supreme Court.
SPEAKER_19As goes the South, goes the rest of the country. The work that we do is about hopefully that meaning something positive instead of what it has always traditionally meant, which is something terrible, which is like every bad policy you can think of was seated in the South and then taken wholesale to the rest of the country within a year. Brown versus the Board of Education. I mean, like all of these landmark cases all come out of the South. It really is, as goes the South. How can we make it mean something positive? And I I, you know, we always talk about this multiracial democracy that none of us have ever seen. We've all we all get up every day and work for it. We get up every day and fight for it. But we've never seen it. We've never seen it.
SPEAKER_13When we started, I didn't appreciate fully the impact that it would have. We started a, as I said, something very narrow, something about my community, about the district I lived in and the state that I was in, to now knowing my name could be attached to the downfall of the entire one of the greatest pillars of the civil rights movement. When you think about your work and kind of now being used and could be the epetus of things that I know my grandmother and my great-grandparents fought through and lived through is something that I wasn't prepared or expecting when I signed up to really do this fight.
SPEAKER_19I mean, it's been an emotional roller coaster. There's the high of you win in this federal court, you lose in another federal court, and then something that we did for good could be used for much larger evil than I think any of us could have imagined. This comes down to a fundamental question of citizenship. If I don't have representation, then you are relegating me to a second-class citizenship. You are codifying into law the fact that I am a second-class citizen. And that is for all black people, all API, Latino, anybody that is not a white man, and women of all races and ethnicities. And I think that that's the part where this becomes about all of us.
SPEAKER_16About voting rights, about Louisiana, about who gets power. But by now, I'm sure you've realized it's also a story about who gets power over you, and me, and everybody in this country. This is the story that historians will write books about. This is the fight that decides what democracy looks like for the rest of us.
SPEAKER_03There's no one more beauty for.
SPEAKER_16Standing under that statue of Huey Long, looming from his grave in front of the Louisiana State House he built, I remembered all the times I've heard it said. As goes the South, so goes the nation.
SPEAKER_08So and so do body. So what so do body?
SPEAKER_11The Supreme Court ruling sparked a new wave in the ongoing redistricting war.
SPEAKER_10The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Alabama to redraw its congressional map ahead of this November's midterm election. South Carolina and Georgia are the latest red states to call for special legislative sessions.
SPEAKER_00New map changes 21 of Florida's 28 congressional districts.
SPEAKER_10The Missouri Senate has passed a Trump-backed congressional map.
SPEAKER_09In a victory for Republicans, the Virginia Supreme Court tossed out a new congressional map that was approved by voters just last month. At least seven other states are considering new maps. The new map could flip four seats from Democrat to Republican.
SPEAKER_16In the next episode of Draw the Line, we'll talk about the history of voting rights in America and how we got here. And yes, it does involve the Civil War. Draw the Line is a podcast from Design Observer. Design Observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show is written by Ellen McGurt, Jessiman Molly, and Justin D. Wright. Our show is produced, mixed, and mastered by Jessamine Molly and Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada. Our theme music is Keep On by Anaya Anderson and Ryan Cook. Thanks, as always, to the Design Observer team, Sarah Gephardt, Cindy Jones Nyland, Grace Knowles, and Rachel Pace for their contributions to the series. This series was made possible in part by the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, which builds civic power in communities across Louisiana. You'll hear from many of their staff and coalition members in this series, but all editorial decisions are Design Observers' own. Head to powercoalition.org for more. To learn more about the people, organizations, ideas, and history mentioned in this episode, head to designobserver.com slash podcasts for the show notes. To support our independent journalism, please join our community of designers, way makers, and other fascinating people on our Substack at designobserver.substack.com. And to discover more long form content about the people and ideas redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletter, The Observatory, at designobserver.com slash newsletters. I'm Ellen McGert. Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_07So what you gonna do about it? So what you would do?