Supreme Court sends Native American voting rights case back for review
The justices sent North Dakota’s Native voting rights fight back to the Eighth Circuit, reopening a case that could shape ballot access and map challenges across seven states.
The Supreme Court sent North Dakota’s Native voting rights fight back to the Eighth Circuit, reviving a case that could determine whether Native voters and tribes can still use federal court to challenge election maps that dilute their power.
The dispute began with North Dakota’s 2021 legislative redistricting plan, challenged by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe and individual Native voters. A federal district court found in November 2023 that Districts 9 and 15 violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, then later imposed a remedial map after the North Dakota Legislature in Bismarck failed to adopt one. That map mattered far beyond one election cycle: it shaped who could be represented in northeastern North Dakota and whether Native communities could translate turnout into actual political power.
The legal ground shifted sharply when the Eighth Circuit ruled on May 14, 2025, that private plaintiffs cannot sue to enforce Section 2 through Section 1983 either. The ruling would have blocked voters in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota from going to court to stop alleged Section 2 violations. The Supreme Court later stayed that mandate on July 16, 2025, keeping the tribes’ preferred map in place while the case remained under review.
On Monday, the justices vacated that posture and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of Louisiana v. Callais, decided April 29, 2026. That Louisiana decision said the state’s map did not have to create an additional majority-Black district and further narrowed the terrain for Section 2 claims. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the remand order, signaling continued disagreement inside the court over how aggressively to curb voting-rights enforcement.
The practical stakes are stark for Native voters who already face long trips to polling places, mail delays and early-voting limits. The Brennan Center for Justice found that voter participation on tribal lands averaged 11 percentage points lower than elsewhere in the states it studied from 2012 to 2022. Native Americans did not gain meaningful participation gains from the 1965 Voting Rights Act until Congress added Section 203 in 1975 to require language assistance in some jurisdictions, decades after the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted citizenship to Native Americans born in the United States.
The remand also lands in a broader fight over who can enforce the Voting Rights Act at all. Section 2 lawsuits have long been the main tool for minority voters challenging discriminatory maps, and the Eighth Circuit’s private-right ruling has already surfaced in other litigation, including a Mississippi redistricting case. For tribes and Native voters, the next round in the Eighth Circuit will decide not just one map in North Dakota, but how much room remains to challenge election lines before the next cycle hardens them again.
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