This is not gerrymandering as usual
Authoritarian forces are changing the rules to guard their power — but what happened in Alabama this weekend shows the way to take it back
On Saturday, tens of thousands of Americans hopped in cars, climbed on buses, and boarded planes to converge upon Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. They carried one message: “We will organize, mobilize, and vote.”
The march from Selma to Montgomery — first trod in 1965, retraced again this weekend — was organized in a little more than a week by Black Voters Matter and a coalition of civil rights and voting rights organizations under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South.” The message was clear. The fight that produced the Voting Rights Act, and with it America’s second, imperfect attempt at a real multiracial democracy, must be refought. And the people who know that best are the ones who showed up to say so.
A sprint to disenfranchise
What is happening in the South right now is not a policy dispute or a legal technicality. It is the opening of a new front in the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy to override the will of the voters and ensure the outcome they want in the 2026 mid-term elections. This is a racist power grab, locking in discriminatory congressional majorities for the foreseeable future — and it is moving fast.
Our colleagues have written extensively on the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy. On Friday we focused on the attempt by the federal government to disrupt the operations of state and local election officials.
But the most visible form of the administration’s “disrupt” strategy right now is the erasure of minority representation through extreme gerrymandering unfolding across the South. The Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, removing any protection against racist gerrymandering, and Republicans across the South sprang into action to redraw legislative maps to erase Black representation.
The Supreme Court didn’t stop there. Last week, the Court — with zero legal explanation from the majority — vacated a lower court order that had kept Alabama from using a 2023 map a federal panel found racially discriminatory, with the state’s primary just over a week away. Louisiana postponed its primary elections after voting had already started. Tennessee and Florida have already enacted new maps; other Southern states are scrambling to follow.
This is not gerrymandering as usual; it is the disrupt strategy at play
Partisan, discriminatory gerrymandering is nothing new, which is one reason why the Voting Rights Act was passed in the first place. So it behooves us to understand why what’s happening now is so different. As laid out in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, states have historically drawn new district lines for Congress and state legislatures every ten years, after the decennial census, not every two years if the party in charge is worried about losing seats.
The rush to disenfranchise voters of color right before an election — and even after an election has already started, in the case of Louisiana — is categorically different from what has come before. The Supreme Court has opened the floodgates for a coordinated and lawless effort to lock in congressional majorities. This effort is already sowing confusion and chaos and is rightly understood as an attempt to manipulate election rules to prevent certain voters from fully participating.
As we’ve explained, modern authoritarians seek to tilt the electoral playing field by both suppressing participation and by manipulating the rules themselves. The redistricting wave is that strategy operating at its most visible, systemic, and consequential scale. The administration did not draw these maps, but it set the conditions for them. The redistricting wars began when Trump publicly urged Texas Republicans to redraw their districts in the summer of 2025.
Opening the door for states to redistrict mid-cycle so close to an election is unprecedented. It is not only clearly racist, it is also clearly intended to bring chaos into the midterms. Candidates don’t know which districts they are running in. Longstanding primary election dates have been changed mid-election. Poll sites are changing mid-cycle, often without time to educate voters on where to go to vote in their primaries. The result is a coordinated, multi-state effort to disenfranchise minority voters and lock in a Republican Congress before a single midterm vote is cast, precisely what the Disrupt strategy is designed to produce.
This is the authoritarian playbook and the white-supremacist playbook, bound together, aimed at one-party rule. The goal is not simply to win the next election. It is to clear the field before the contest begins.
The people will “redeem the soul of America”
This is why Saturday mattered. The people who traveled from Atlanta, Memphis, Jackson, and Nashville to stand in Montgomery were not engaged in nostalgia. They were responding to a present-tense threat with a present-tense act. Led by Cliff Albright, LaTosha Brown, and numerous faith, community, and thought leaders, those who were in Alabama this weekend did what John Lewis told us to: They got into Good Trouble. Necessary Trouble.
The march from Selma in 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act. That act, for 61 years, served as the primary legal check on exactly this kind of map manipulation. Callais has gutted the legal remedy. The organizers of “All Roads Lead to the South” were explicit about this: The march matters, but so do the maps.
It has opened the doors for southern states to redistrict in an attempt to weaken the power of Black voters by ensuring they do not have majority representation anywhere. But as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, “We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.” And we must vote.
Voting rights organizations have established a redistricting intelligence operation that tracks every legislative session in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, in real time, by district, with the specific seats at risk named and documented. As importantly, they are organizing in each of these states to ensure that voters know where their poll sites are, how to cast their vote, and, most crucially, that their vote matters now more than ever.
That kind of organizing is the answer.
So what now?
The legal check on discriminatory maps has been gutted by the Supreme Court. The political check has not. Here is where to direct our energy:
Follow the map battles in real time. The Black Power War Room’s redistricting tracker covers every state where maps are being redrawn. Know which seats are at risk and who is drawing the lines.
Contact your state legislators. Redistricting decisions are made in statehouses, not Washington. If you live in a state where new maps are being drawn, your state representative needs to hear from you now — not in October.
Support the organizations doing this work. The groups that register voters, educate communities, and pursue litigation under what remains of the Voting Rights Act are under sustained pressure. They need resources and solidarity.
Get out the vote. Talk to your neighbors and friends. Educate yourself and each other. If there isn’t a contested election in your district, join efforts to call, text, and write to voters who may be confused about where and how to vote. Make sure they know that every vote matters.
The battle will not be over in November. Or in 2028. We can be forward-looking and restructure our electoral system to end the constant gerrymandering caused by a winner-takes-all system that benefits the loudest, most extreme voices. Proportional representation would eliminate single-member districts and establish multi-candidate districts in which minority voters would still have representation.
The authoritarians hope that the maps being drawn this month will shape who represents Americans in Congress for the next decade or more. The people who marched on Saturday understand that. They showed up to say that the rules may be manipulated, but in the end, it’s the voters who have the final say. We will see them at the midterms.
This is part of our ongoing Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so.
 | A guest post by
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 | A guest post by
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The Democratic Party establishment and its political leaders are not interested in Justice. They are interested in the judicial system agreeing with them, no matter what.
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/fighting-and-dying-for-segregation
The fight has to continue past the 2026 midterms, past the 2028 presidential election, and into the future. MAGA has been dreaming about rolling back citizenship and voting rights since 1865. Yes, since 1865.