In a wave of last-minute redistricting across the American South, Republican-led legislatures have thrown congressional primary elections into disarray, leaving voters uncertain about which races they are voting in and forcing election officials to scramble for remedies. The chaotic cascade follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act — a ruling that President Donald Trump and GOP leaders treated as a green light to redraw maps that could eliminate several Democratic-held districts, many of them represented by Black lawmakers.
The consequences are unfolding in real time. In Louisiana, where a week of early voting began on May 2 and the primary is set for this Saturday, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry declared an emergency on April 30 to suspend congressional primaries so the Legislature could draw a new map. Nearly 179,000 voters had already cast early or absentee ballots as of May 9, the Louisiana secretary of state’s office said. Those ballots included U.S. House races, but state officials have said votes in those contests will not be counted.
For voters like 66-year-old Sallie Davis, a New Orleans resident who voted early last week, the suspension translated into a booth-level breakdown. Her ballot listed Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, but a sign at her polling station showed his race crossed out by hand. A poll worker, Davis said, told her to accept what the sign appeared to convey. “I was supposed to believe a piece of paper with an X on it marking out the person I wanted to vote for,” Davis said, her voice breaking. “I think I have been disenfranchised. I think my vote … it’s not going to count or something. I think it’s illegal.”
Landry, asked about the confusion in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, began to dismiss the disruption as “not a big deal” before stopping short of completing the phrase. “If anyone has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court,” he said.
Alabama’s primary is one week away. State lawmakers, in a last-minute scramble, passed legislation on Friday that authorizes a do-over of congressional primaries. Voting will go forward on May 19 under the existing district lines, but the state does not plan to count those results. The Supreme Court, in a ruling handed down Monday, permitted Alabama to switch to redrawn districts, though the new map has yet to be enacted.
Amir Badat, a Jackson, Mississippi-based voting rights attorney and activist, said the pattern across states amounts to a structural hazard for voters. “Modern-day voter suppression relies on election administration errors and chaos, and that’s what we’re going to see play out in all of these states,” Badat said.
In Tennessee, where a new map dividing Memphis among three districts was enacted last week, the state elections coordinator warned county officials in a memo that the changes would require reprogramming election systems, retraining poll workers, and potentially adjusting precinct boundaries — moves that could shift voters’ polling places before the Aug. 6 primary.
Voting rights advocates in the state pointed to a 2022 precedent in Nashville, where Republican lawmakers similarly carved the city into three districts to flip a Democratic seat. A subsequent state report found that more than 3,000 voters had been assigned to the wrong districts in that election, with more than 430 casting ballots in incorrect races.
“It’s going to be really hard for the election commissions to be able to keep up with this short timeline,” Matia Powell, executive director of the voting rights nonprofit Civic TN, said on a conference call with other advocates.
The upheaval is not limited to state-level logistics. Democratic state senators and local election officials said they have been inundated with calls from confused citizens. Michael McClanahan, president of the NAACP’s Louisiana State Conference, said he is hearing “total confusion” from voters who believe the entire election has been canceled. “He only suspended one aspect of it,” McClanahan said of the governor. In Alabama, Senate Democratic leader Bobby Singleton said he had fielded calls from public officials running elections. “These are the people who are the head of elections,” Singleton said. “They don’t know what to do.”
Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, a group that supports voting and civil rights organizations, warned of a slower-moving danger. “Once people stop believing that the process is stable and fair, disengagement is going to increase, and that’s one of the biggest dangers here,” Hardy said. “Democracy doesn’t just depend on voting systems existing but really on people believing that their participation matters.”
In Baton Rouge on Friday, Davis and other Democratic voters protested the gerrymandering outside the Louisiana Capitol. She carried a bullhorn and chanted, “Whose vote? Our vote!” David Victorian, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran from the city, said: “I’m concerned for the survival of the democracy that we’re supposed to be living in.”
The redistricting drive extends beyond Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee. Republican lawmakers in Mississippi are set to begin a special session on May 20. Renovations of the state House chamber will force them to meet in the Old State Capitol, the very building where Mississippi lawmakers once enacted Jim Crow laws that suppressed Black voting for generations. In South Carolina, officials are weighing whether to move all of the state’s June 9 primaries to August, with the state Elections Commission estimating that a separate election for congressional races alone would cost $3 million. Florida has already enacted a map that could cost Democrats four of their eight congressional seats.
The summary effect across the region is a primary season in which millions of voters will cast ballots under rules that are still being written — and in some cases, under rules that will be changed after the ballots are already in.