The Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision had an immediate impact on this year’s elections. More changes are likely.
Activists rally in Montgomery to protest repeal of black voting rights
Demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama, gathered to express their opposition to a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court may not be able to disrupt this year’s elections.
In the aftermath of recent decisions weakening the Voting Rights Act, the court has two more election-related cases that could be decided in its next opinion, scheduled for release on May 28.
At issue is when mailed ballots should be received and counted, and whether one of the last remaining cash checks in politics should be abolished.
Rick Hasen, an election expert and law professor at UCLA, isn’t focused on the number of election-related cases the courts are deciding.
“There was also a period where there were a lot of incidents surrounding elections,” he said. “What’s unusual about this is that it’s having an immediate impact on the election.”
Changes to the Voting Rights Act forced several Southern states to redraw their congressional maps even though voting for this year’s candidates had already begun.
Alabama has postponed party primaries in four of its seven congressional districts as it seeks to eliminate districts with large black populations, and the battle is playing out again at the Supreme Court.
Additionally, depending on what judges decide in other pending cases, campaign spending and votes counted could change immediately.
Let’s take a look at the potential implications.
“Earthquake effects” according to Voting Rights Act ruling
An April 29 court ruling tossing out Louisiana’s congressional maps for relying too heavily on race to classify voters has made it significantly harder for blacks and other racial minorities to argue that the maps unfairly dilute their voting power.
The ruling “will absolutely have an impact on the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Froomkin, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center who specializes in election law.
“States across the South are already moving to eliminate minority opportunity districts once guaranteed under the Voting Rights Act,” Froomkin said in an emailed response. “While it is difficult to predict the long-term effects with certainty because it could change the behavior of voters and political parties, the short-term effect is clearly that it could shift House seats to Republicans.”
This decision had a major impact not only on how cases were decided, but also when decisions were made.
If the decision had been issued earlier this season, states like Louisiana and Alabama wouldn’t have had to use it to postpone their elections. And the July decision likely came too late for most states to change their maps before the November election.
“What the Supreme Court did, it should have known how devastating it would be,” Hasen said. “If we had come a month earlier, or three months later, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
And the courts have not yet dealt with the implications.
Alabama filed an emergency appeal on May 27 asking the Supreme Court to use pro-Republican congressional maps that lower courts said intentionally discriminated against black voters.
Mail-in ballot grace period
In a case argued in March, the Supreme Court is deciding whether to strike down a Mississippi law that allows ballots cast by Election Day to be counted if they are received within five days.
More than a dozen states have similar laws. Additional states allow late voting by military and overseas voters.
Daniel Thompson, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on how election rules affect outcomes, said eliminating grace periods may not affect election results because relatively few ballots arrive late, regardless of whether states have grace periods.
But if the court upholds a Republican challenge to the Mississippi law, it could be a public relations victory for President Donald Trump, who has long opposed mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud and claimed without evidence that it damaged the 2020 election.
Froomkin, of the University of Houston Law Center, said the incident “needs to be understood as part of a broader pattern of Republicans seeking to undermine public confidence in the integrity of elections.”
Still, the decision could pose problems for states with grace periods, said Richard Briffault, an election law expert at Columbia Law School.
Because the Supreme Court can only mandate changes in federal elections, states could end up applying different rules for votes cast in state and local elections. Changing those rules to avoid confusion could require the state Legislature to be back in session, he said.
“I can’t imagine states not doing that, but if they don’t, there will be chaos,” Briffault said.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, also said the decision to end the grace period could drop a “disruption bomb” on vote tallies in the military and overseas.
Levitt said he could see no legal reason why the decision to exclude the regular absentee voting grace period shouldn’t also apply to late-arriving ballots from military and overseas voters.
“Perhaps that fact will help judges who want to leave further election chaos alone for now,” Levitt wrote on his election law blog.
If the court rules out the grace period for federal elections, Hasen said election officials would need a massive education campaign to inform voters of the importance of returning their ballots on time.
He added that it usually takes several election cycles for voters to understand such changes, so some probably won’t get the message this year and will lose their votes.
While it’s unlikely to have an overall impact on the election outcome, Briffault said, “It could have an impact on any election.”
“Obviously in a close election, there’s going to be a fight for every vote,” he said.
Republican challenge to campaign finance rules
A lawsuit filed in December gives the Supreme Court a chance to continue reducing campaign spending and contribution limits.
Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance, are challenging a more than 50-year-old rule that caps the amount political parties can spend on coordination with candidates.
The decision to remove this cap could benefit Republicans, at least in the short term, because Democratic candidates are better at raising small donations and are less reliant on party funding.
But Briffault doubts the decision will be a game-changer, as political parties already have other ways to spend large sums of money to support candidates.
Froomkin also said that while the Republican Party currently has a lot of cash on hand, each party’s fundraising ebbs and flows.
Hasen said there could be more confusion if the court sides with Republicans by changing the standard for reviewing the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions.
“It probably won’t have any impact in 2026, but it could have a big impact in the future,” he said.
