Why Neutral Maps Could Empower Black Voters as Much as the Voting Rights Act (Nate Cohn and Eve Washington, May 17, 2026, NY Times)
A race-neutral, nonpartisan redistricting process could create just as many House districts where the candidate preferred by nonwhite voters — usually a Democrat — would be favored to win.
One way to tell whether nonwhite voters would lose their power in that kind of redistricting process is by looking at computer simulations of hypothetical congressional districts. The algorithms, first designed by a team of political scientists in 2022, try to draw compact districts that respect county and municipal lines. After the Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, we reran the simulations without consideration of race. Using the algorithms to draw new districts thousands of times with those compactness constraints can give a good sense of what neutral maps could look like.
And the simulations yield roughly as many so-called minority-opportunity districts across the South as existed under the Voting Rights Act.
In other words, the act didn’t create minority representation that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Nonpartisan, race-neutral redistricting would still preserve many such districts, even if in a different configuration…