Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito relied on misleading data to support his ruling decimating the Voting Rights Act, The Guardian reported Friday.
In the court’s majority opinion, Alito claimed that the kind of racial discrimination that had prompted the creation of the Voting Rights Act no longer existed.
“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,” Alito wrote.
He was citing a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the Department of Justice, which relied on a statistical methodology that is not preferred by experts in determining statewide voter turnout. The brief calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. This is generally considered a suboptimal method because it includes people who can’t vote, including noncitizens and people with felony convictions.
Experts typically prefer to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population, or the eligible population. Using this methodology, The Guardian determined that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.
Using the DOJ’s data, Alito also elided the fact that the racial voter gap is actually widening. In the three most recent presidential elections since Barack Obama was on the ballot, Black voter turnout has trailed white voter turnout, according to The Guardian’s analysis. In Louisiana, the disparity grew wider between 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that Alito’s claim is “simply not factual,” and that the turnout gap had “exploded” over the last three years.
Michael McDonald, a leading expert on voter turnout who teaches at the University of Florida, told The Guardian that relying on this “misleading” methodology was purposeful. “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population,” McDonald said.
“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has opened the door for redistricting efforts across the country, as Republicans rush to redraw Democrat-led districts, many of which have majority-Black populations.