191 Seats at Risk
Georgia’s special session could eliminate four majority-Black congressional districts with no public maps. Across the South, 191 state legislative seats are at risk of losing Black representation through redistricting. Nineteen Congressional Black Caucus members could lose their seats.
191 seats at risk. 4 Georgia districts may be eliminated. 21.3 million citizens lack documents to register. The Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision was gutted in 2013. The John Lewis Act would restore it.
In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision removed the requirement that states with histories of discrimination get federal approval before changing voting rules. Since then, 32 restrictive voting laws passed in 17 states in 2025 alone. Thirty-one will be in effect for the 2026 midterms.
What the Act Would Do
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act restores federal preclearance for states with recent histories of discrimination. It does not block all voting changes. It requires review before changes take effect — so discriminatory rules are caught before they harm voters, not after.
Twenty-one point three million American citizens lack the documents the SAVE Act would require to register. Voter roll purges using error-prone databases removed eligible voters without notice in multiple states.
Georgia audited 8.2 million voters and found 20 noncitizen registrations. Nine actually voted. The threat to elections is not fraud. It is the barriers being built to stop eligible voters.
What You Can Do
- Write your senators about the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Use the letter and call script below.
- Ask whether your senators support restoring federal review of discriminatory voting rules.
- Read the Voting hub and the redistricting analysis.
Update, June 5, 2026: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais to allow Alabama to use a congressional map that a lower federal court found intentionally discriminates against Black voters, according to NPR. The decision leaves Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act practically unenforceable in redistricting cases, according to multiple legal experts. Wilfred Codrington III, a constitutional law professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, said the damage falls hardest on Southern states where voting splits along racial and partisan lines.
State-level voting rights acts now represent one of the few remaining legal tools, but only about a dozen states have enacted them, and none with unified Republican or divided government has done so. Democratic lawmakers have advanced bills in Michigan and New Jersey; the Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act is set for formal introduction June 6. Within days of the Callais ruling, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit challenging Illinois’ state voting rights act, arguing it requires an unconstitutional use of race in redistricting.
Nick Stephanopoulos, an election law professor at Harvard Law School, argues that Democratic-controlled states can use partisan redistricting to preserve minority representation without giving ground, pointing to California’s court-approved congressional map as evidence. California Democrats drew that map to flip five Republican-held seats while keeping all minority-opportunity districts intact. Stephanopoulos told NPR that without congressional action, Southern states face no legal check: “Only federal action would respond to the vacuum that’s left in the South.”