In the wake of Donald Trump’s first electoral win in 2016, a friend of mine – a gay progressive who doesn’t follow politics too closely – told me, exasperatedly, “The Democrats should get rid of the Electoral College!”
I get it: The Electoral College is the reason Trump won in 2016. While I was taught in high school that the Electoral College was there to protect America from a demagogue becoming president, instead, it had been used to overturn the American people’s desire for a technocratic, center-left, fairly mainstream politician – Hillary Clinton – and elect a demagogue who didn’t seem to have much of an opinion on policy beyond hating immigrants.
The Electoral College was shown in that moment to be all downside and no upside, unless you’re a Republican who thinks it’ll always help your side win. It is a clearly broken institution that makes no sense in the 21st century and can’t even accomplish the one thing it was supposed to do.
But it won’t go away any time soon. Moving to a popular vote system would require three-quarters of state legislatures to pass a constitutional amendment dismantling the Electoral College, a system that gives many states much more representation than they would get in a popular vote system. So we’re stuck with it.
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I was thinking about this when I read that the Supreme Court recently ruled against states drawing up congressional districting maps that afforded proportional representation to racial minorities. There is no way to pass meaningful democratic reforms that would make the government better reflect the will of the people, because the Supreme Court’s strong conservative majority will rule anything as unconstitutional if it weakens the GOP.
The case involved the congressional district map of Louisiana, a state with six members of Congress and that just happens to be almost exactly one-third Black, according to the 2020 Census. So it would be proportional if two of the six districts were majority-Black. But when the state’s 2020 districting map only had one majority-Black district, some people sued, saying that Republicans had set up the map so that white voters disproportionately got too much influence in the state.
After years of litigation, the conservatives on the Supreme Court decided this week that the 1965 Voting Rights Act does not require proportional representation and that it’s actually the people asking for proportional representation who are the real racists for demanding a racial gerrymander. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that taking race into account at all is the problem, even as red states move towards hyper-gerrymandering to dilute Black and Hispanic people’s votes.
The court’s reasoning – that it’s ok to take race into account when dividing minority populations between districts in order to ensure more Republican wins because that’s partisan gerrymandering and not racial – is “Orwellian,” according to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
this line from alito’s opinion, that the question before the court was “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination,” is truly orwellian — jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) 2026-04-30T16:28:46.046Z
it is racial discrimination to try ensure that the representation of a minority group is roughly in line with its proportion of the state’s population. it is equal protection to allow a state to obliterate a minority group’s representation. — jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) 2026-04-30T16:29:56.628Z
“The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” Justice Elena Kagan, one of the Court’s liberals, wrote in her dissent. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 [of the 1965 Voting Rights Act] all but a dead letter.”
There are currently 61 Black people serving in the House of Representatives, which is more or less proportionate to the 13% of the national population that is Black. But experts believe that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais will reduce that.
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the ruling an “outright power grab… about silencing Black voices, dismantling majority Black districts and rigging the maps so that politicians can choose their voters instead of the other way around.”
This affects LGBTQ+ issues specifically, as Black elected officials have, by and large, been good on LGBTQ+ equality.
This is far from the first Supreme Court ruling against voting rights. It’s not even the first ruling against the Voting Rights Act specifically, an overwhelmingly popular law passed by Congress under the broad powers granted by the 15th Amendment.
That is, this isn’t a fluke, and the Court will keep on making decisions like this.
But what can be done about it? What makes this situation feel hopeless is that any law addressing gerrymandering can be overturned by the Supreme Court. Constitutional amendments are off the table for at least a few decades because states that want to gerrymander will reject them, and 38 states must ratify a constitutional amendment for it to be adopted. And any constitutional amendment that gets passed can be interpreted away to nothing by a conservative court with an agenda – we just saw that this week.
And as long as the right gets extra representation in government, the government will have a strong tendency towards inequality and authoritarianism.
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