Voter confusion and headaches for election officials follow hasty GOP push to redraw US House seats
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Thousands of Louisiana voters have already cast early ballots for congressional candidates in what soon could be the wrong districts. Alabama's primaries are a week away, but the state could force a do-over for voting on U.S. House races. A new congressional map in Tennessee upended races that had been underway for months.
Republicans' rush to gerrymander congressional districts across several Southern states after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling hollowed out the Voting Rights Act is confusing voters and creating logistical headaches for local election officials. The changes are hitting while primary season is in progress.
The chaotic upheaval to an election season that could determine which party controls the U.S. House is the latest fallout from an intensely partisan gerrymandering battle initiated by President Donald Trump last year to protect Republicans' slim majority.
The Supreme Court's decision last month severely weakening the Voting Rights Act required Louisiana to reconsider a map drawn in 2024 with two majority minority congressional districts that elected Black representatives. The GOP-controlled Legislature could eliminate one or both in a state where roughly 30% of the population is Black.
The ruling also encouraged Republicans in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee to consider eliminating four Democratic districts among them, three represented by Black lawmakers. Florida has a new map meant to cost Democrats four of their eight seats, out of 28.
In Louisiana, 66-year-old New Orleans resident Sallie Davis voted early last week. Her ballot allowed her to vote for Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, but a sign at her polling booth showed his race crossed off with a ballpoint pen. She was confused and frustrated — especially when a poll worker told her to go with what the sign seemed to convey. She's now worried that her entire ballot will not be counted.
"I was supposed to believe a piece of paper with an X on it marking out the person I wanted to vote for,” she said, her voice breaking as she recounted her experience later. “I think I have been disenfranchised. I think my vote, that I just voted on, it's not going to count or something. I think it's illegal.”
Louisiana's primary is Saturday, and a week of early voting there began May 2, two days after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry declared an emergency and suspended congressional primaries to give lawmakers a chance to draw a new map.
The Louisiana secretary of state's office said nearly 179,000 primary ballots had been cast as of Friday, including about 53,000 absentee ballots returned by mail. The ballots included U.S. House races, but votes in those contests won't be counted.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that CBS aired Sunday, the governor started to say, “It's not a big deal,” but didn't complete the word “deal.”
“If anyone has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court,” he said.
In Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee, Republicans said new maps for increasing GOP seats would better reflect their states' conservative values. Alabama lawmakers passed legislation Friday allowing a do-over of congressional primaries.
Alabama’s primary is May 19, and voting in congressional races will occur then as planned, but with the old districts. Those votes would end up not counting if a court allows the switch to different districts.
Mississippi held its primaries in March, but a federal court has ordered it to redraw its state Supreme Court districts, and Trump is pushing Republicans to redraw the state's four congressional districts.
A special session of its Legislature is set for May 20. Renovations of the House chamber will force members to meet at the Old State Capitol, where, decades ago, Mississippi lawmakers passed Jim Crow laws suppressing Black voting.
“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,” said Amir Badat, a Jackson, Mississippi, voting rights attorney and activist.
Tennessee was the first state to enact a new map since the U.S. Supreme Court decision, but Trump's push for redistricting started in Texas last year. Democrats countered in California and tried but ran afoul of the courts in Virginia.
Tennessee’s new map divided Memphis among three congressional districts. Before its enactment last week, the state’s elections coordinator told county officials in a memo that it would mean reprogramming election systems, retraining poll workers and possibly adjusting precinct boundaries, meaning some voters’ polling places could change.
Tennessee's congressional primaries will go forward Aug. 6 as planned, with candidates required to qualify by Friday.
In South Carolina, lawmakers could move all the state's June 9 primaries to August, or just the congressional races. While mail balloting is limited because the state requires an excuse, more than 6,800 mail ballots already had been sent to voters — with 260 returned — as of Friday, the state Elections Commission said.
A separate election for congressional primaries would cost $3 million and the time for preparations would be compressed, Conway Belangia, the commission's executive director, told lawmakers Friday.
“It will be difficult, but it will be possible,” he said.
Michael McClanahan, the NAACP's Louisiana State Conference president, is hearing “total confusion” as voters call him and ask, "Is there an election?”
“People say, ’I ain’t going to vote because the governor’s suspended the election,'" he said. "But he didn’t, he only suspended one aspect of it.”
In Alabama, Senate Democratic leader Bobby Singleton said he has been fielding calls from confused public officials.
“These are the people who are the head of elections,” he said. "They don’t know what to do.“
Voting rights activists see a harbinger for Memphis voters in problems that arose in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2022, when Republican legislators divided the state's capital city into three congressional districts to take a seat from Democrats. A state report said more than 3,000 Nashville-area voters were assigned to incorrect districts and more than 430 cast ballots in the wrong races in the November 2022 election.
“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 during a conference call Friday with other voting rights activists in the South.
Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, which provides support to voting and civil rights groups, said people will lose trust in elections if they believe the rules can change every two years.
“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,” she said. “Democracy doesn’t just depend on voting systems existing but really on people believing that their participation matters.”
At least a few Democratic voters who went to the Louisiana Capitol on Friday to protest the gerrymandering expressed doubt about whether they still have a political voice.
Davis came to the State Capitol in Baton Rouge and had a bullhorn with her for a protest in which she yelled, “Whose vote? Our vote!”
David Victorian, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran from Baton Rouge, said: “I’m concerned for the survival of the democracy that we’re supposed to be living in.”
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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and Kim Chandler, in Montgomery, Ala., contributed.
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