Democratic Minority Leader's Statement on Louisiana v. Callais

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Today, South Dakota Senate Minority Leader Liz Larson released the following statement on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

This decision is a direct attack on the promise of American democracy, and its consequences will be felt right here in South Dakota.

For sixty years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act stood as the last meaningful protection against the deliberate dilution of minority votes. Today, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court effectively gutted it, not by striking it down, but by hollowing it out. Justice Kagan was right: it is now all but a dead letter.

South Dakota is not insulated from this. Look no further than our neighbors in North Dakota, where the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe fought all the way through the federal courts to secure basic representation in their state legislature. A federal judge found that legislators had deliberately packed Native voters into majority-white districts, stripping them of real political power. Section 2 was the tool that forced change. That tool has now been taken away.

South Dakota's Native communities, on Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, and Crow Creek, have fought the same fights. They have faced gerrymandered maps designed to dilute their voices. The Eighth Circuit has already ruled that voters in our state cannot bring private litigation under Section 2. This decision compounds that injustice.

This ruling forces our minority communities to rely on legislative goodwill instead of established law. We have seen this one-party legislature fail those communities time and again.

Our caucus will use every available tool to safeguard free and fair elections for every South Dakotan, from Sioux Falls to Standing Rock. The right to vote is not partisan. It is the foundation of everything else.

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