『Michael Latner on voting rights, proportional representation, and the ruins of the VRA』のカバーアート

Michael Latner on voting rights, proportional representation, and the ruins of the VRA

Michael Latner on voting rights, proportional representation, and the ruins of the VRA

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The Callais decision is a watershed moment. Latner argues the only path forward runs through "party-system" reforms: PR w/ a side of Fusion. The Supreme Court didn't just rewrite the rules of redistricting in Louisiana v. Callais. It effectively ended, after more than forty years, the regime of legal protection for minority voters that the Voting Rights Act had built. The decision stripped away the tools that voting rights lawyers have relied on since the 1980s to identify and remedy racial vote dilution, leaving what Justice Kagan called, in dissent, "a dead letter." The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Michael Latner, professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and director of research on democratic reform at Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Latner co-authored Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular Sovereignty, and a major article in the Yale Law Journal (co-authored with Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Carlos Algara) titled "Callais Confusion, Power Sharing, and the Inevitability of Proportional Representation" — published shortly before the Court issued its ruling. Host Micah Sifry puts that article, and its central argument, to the test over the course of a wide-ranging, substantive conversation. Latner walks through the mechanics of the Callais decision with admirable clarity. It isn't just that the court made it harder to prove discrimination; it's that the majority essentially declared that the only permissible approach is "racial blindness" — that courts can no longer rely on racial data to identify whether district maps dilute minority voting power. The catch: in a country where 90 percent of Black voters in Louisiana vote for the Democratic Party, the idea that race and party affiliation can be cleanly separated is, in Latner's telling, "empirically not possible." States can now gerrymander with impunity as long as they claim they're doing it for partisan, not racial, reasons. The fallout has been fast. Louisiana suspended an ongoing primary to redraw its maps and remove one of its two majority-minority districts. Tennessee eliminated its Black congressional district. Alabama, Mississippi — and maybe others are moving. As Latner puts it, states are "acting on the decision even before the ink is dry." What does all of this tell us about American democracy more broadly? Latner doesn't soften the diagnosis: "We are the only major democracy in the world that seats only two parties in its legislature... many U.S. voters were understandably upset at the Democratic Party in 2024. It was a poorly performing party. There was a leadership crisis. These are things that in normal democracies you would see the governing party replaced with an alternative. The problem in the U.S. is that the only alternative was an authoritarian one." Most proportional systems, he notes, have contained or constrained their authoritarian movements — through coalition governments that collapse when one party overreaches, or through vote-share constraints that limit how much power any single faction can accumulate. The United States is one of the rare cases where a major party has been fully taken over by authoritarian forces and handed unilateral control of government. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural consequence of our electoral system. This brings Latner to the central argument of his Yale Law Journal article: that proportional representation (PR) is not merely desirable but, given where the courts have taken us, inevitable. "The short answer hearkens back to Winston Churchill — that the Americans will do the right thing after they've tried everything else." The logic runs as follows. If the Supreme Court demands racial blindness, and if the only system that can achieve fair representation without relying on racial data is one where the threshold for winning a seat is low enough that any coherent organized coalition gets seats proportional to its votes — then proportional representation isn't just a reform preference. It is the only legally defensible path to minority representation in a post-VRA world. "If the Supreme Court is serious and we are now in an era, a post-VRA era where … the use of racial data in order to protect voters of color is not going to be used in operation of protecting voting rights; and if in fact racial blindness, which is what the court refers to as an appropriate approach to protecting voting rights, if that's actually the only option, there's only one type of electoral system where you can truly be racially blind. That is, you don't take account of race when you're designing the rules and the system, and that's proportional representation." The contrast with the old VRA framework is sharp. Under the Voting Rights Act, the state had to carve out specific districts, count citizen voting-age population, use ...
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