This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
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A U.S. Supreme Court decision in a major redistricting case Wednesday reshaped the Voting Rights Act, raising the bar for when race can be considered in drawing voting districts. That change is likely to ripple into Michigan’s next redistricting cycle — and could even shape elections before that.
At its core, the Louisiana v. Callais decision makes it harder to challenge political maps as racially discriminatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Members of the the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission disagreed on whether the ruling means new maps are likely.
Rebecca Szetela — vice chair of the commission and a politically neutral member of it — now believes the commission could be called back in the wake of the ruling.
“I think it’s likely the maps that were drawn by Michigan’s Independent Redistricting Commission are likely going to be challenged and may, under this ruling, need to be redrawn,” she told Votebeat on Wednesday, just a few hours after the decision was released.
The 13-member commission finished its work on the current maps in 2024 and is currently dormant, but it can be reactivated under some circumstances.
Voters in 2018 overwhelmingly approved that year’s Proposal 2, which took redistricting for both statewide and congressional maps out of the hands of the state legislature and put it in the hands of the newly created independent redistricting commission. The commission has four members each from the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as five members considered politically neutral. Members apply and are selected via lottery.
But the commission must “comply with the voting rights act and other federal laws.” Its initial proposed legislative maps after the 2020 U.S. Census were challenged in a lawsuit alleging they would “dilute Black voter voting strength.”
Courts eventually approved redrawn legislative maps that tried to fix that problem. But the role race played in drawing those revised districts could draw renewed scrutiny under the new ruling, Szetela said.
“Race was a predominant factor,” she said. “With respect to the House and the Senate maps that we did redraw, there were still districts within those maps that had been drawn with race predominating.”
But Anthony Eid, chair of the commission and also a neutral member, disagreed Wednesday.
He said the ultimately approved maps were made with “a race-blind approach,” and that he would be surprised if the current commission ended up drawing maps again. Michigan’s maps are some of the fairest in the country, he said, and he doesn’t expect challenges to them.
“It could happen,” he said. “If that happens, I’m sure the commission will be ready to defend this work.”
One of the biggest barriers to a 2026 redistricting is timing. The deadline for candidates to file to run in the current districts was April 21, and the primary elections are Aug. 4. The state is just six months away from a major election, one that will see the entire Michigan Legislature up for grabs, as well as the governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and other statewide seats.
New maps could be theoretically possible in that timeframe, Szetela said, although it would be difficult. Regardless, she thinks the state will have to draw maps again before the next census.
Michigan’s local elections could change in aftermath of Callais decision
The full implications of the ruling are still uncertain, but at least some suggest it could reverberate beyond political maps.
“In the past, when Michigan has seen action regarding the VRA, it has been with local towns, local municipalities, and how they have their elections structured,” Corwin Smidt, interim director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, told Votebeat.
One of the best examples is the city of Eastpointe, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit located in Macomb County. The Department of Justice sued Eastpointe in 2017 alleging that using at-large methods of voting in the city violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by preventing Black residents of the city from having an equal chance to elect councilmembers of their choice.
The city had never elected a Black councilmember, despite the city being more than one-third Black. Per an agreement with the federal government, the city switched to ranked-choice voting for the November 2019 election, and again to fill a council seat in 2020.
If Section 2 is harder to use to challenge election systems, Smidt also believes local jurisdictions are likely to move away from ward-based representation — used in many of the biggest communities around the state — and back to at-large voting.
“A lot of those wards are artifacts of VRA concerns and providing sufficient minority representation,” Smidt said. “Cities could more easily move away from a ward-based representation to an at-large representation without this provision in the VRA.”
What comes next for Michigan voting?
It is difficult to predict what Michigan’s maps will look like when they’re reconsidered after the 2030 census.
In much of the state, some experts don’t expect much to change. Steven Winter, a constitutional law professor at Wayne State University, said that the current maps do not have “a lot of weird districts,” although he noted that didn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable.
“The biggest problem is always in the urban areas,” he said. “It’s easy to draw a sensible-looking district in areas that are less well-populated, but in urban districts where things are dense” things can get more complicated.
That is especially true in and around Detroit. The city itself is more than 75% Black, according to Census Bureau estimates, and the surrounding communities are also more diverse than many other parts of the state.
The exact effects are difficult to predict, though.
“We took an evidence- and data-based approach … to make districts where folks in minority communities could elect their candidates of choice,” Eid said Wednesday. “I think it’s likely that future commissions will probably have to do the same thing, but the VRA might look completely different in three years, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Melinda Billingsley, the communications director for Voters Not Politicians, which initially put forward the 2018 constitutional amendment that created the independent redistricting commission, said somelanguage in the amendment could blunt the impact of the ruling in Michigan.
Specifically, the amendment protects “communities of interest,” including those with shared cultural or economic interests, but it explicitly excludes protection for political gerrymandering.
“Our expectation as of right now is that the other criteria that the MICRC have to follow will continue to protect Michigan voters from the worst kind of partisan or racial gerrymandering,” Billingsley said.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
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