Supreme court's Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ
Source: The Guardian
Fri 8 May 2026 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 8 May 2026 07.01 EDT
The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.
In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”
But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/08/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-misleading-data-doj
Of course they did. Racists will do everything they can to justify their racist actions because they don't want to be called out as racist.
And some are naive to claim that they "don't have a racist bone in their body", carefully omitting their hearts and brains where the hate resides.
And regarding this -
IOW, the calculation SHOULD BE using the number of voters who DID vote out of the total population of ELIGIBLE voters over 18 versus the number of voters who DID vote out of a TOTAL population over 18. That's because the prisons are loaded with (often-over charged) black felons as well as other felons who cannot vote, along with non-citizens who still get counted in census/population estimates.
= new reply since forum marked as read
