Racial Redistricting: How the Supreme Court Ruling Could Affect California’s Prop 50

California’s controversial mid-decade redistricting scheme is on notice: not only did the mapmaker who drew the map publicly state that districts were designed to “bolster” Latino voting strength and to hit specific racial targets, last week’s Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais struck down racial gerrymandering, i.e. drawing congressional districts based on race under the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Democrats can no longer rig maps based on race.

This will have a direct impact on California’s Proposition 50 – rammed through at lightening speed last fall. The Globe reported, In August, California’s legislative Democrats kicked the voter approved independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission to the curb for the next few elections, when they introduced their package of three bills, SB 280, AB 604, and ACA 8, to redraw California’s congressional districts mid-decade.

This is a big problem for California, and it is about to play out in federal court. PILF, the Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal challenge in December to California’s Proposition 50 on the grounds it violates both the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.

The Globe talked with PILF President J Christian Adams, who explained that earlier legal attempts to halt Proposition 50 were unsuccessful because the cases needed factual development.

However, “the fact that these maps were ratified by voters in Proposition 50 should not save them at the U.S. Supreme Court, based on precedent,” Adams said in a January 2026 op-ed.

The PILF complaint says:

Although frequently marketed to the public as a lawful partisan gerrymander intended to counter redistricting efforts in Texas, the “first thing” that Paul Mitchell, the architect of the Proposition 50 map “did in drawing the new map”—the “number one thing that [he] first started thinking about”—was to create a new “majority/minority Latino district.”

And while legislators discussed the purported dilution of Democratic representation elsewhere across the country, they also alleged that the voting power of racial groups in other states was being diluted and California must respond. They feared that a “Latino voice in Texas is worth one third of the representation as a white voice.” That Texas would “slid[e] back” to the days of “black codes, and Jim Crow.” And that Texas legislators would “silence the voices of Latino voters.” The Proposition 50 map would therefore serve as a “shield” against “racist maps” elsewhere so that minorities in California could “stand up and be counted.” The end result was a new congressional district map that manipulates district lines in the name of bolstering or safeguarding the voting power of certain Californians on the basis of their race.

PILF noted, “In his Louisiana v Callais concurrence, Justice Thomas wrote, This Court should never have interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’ By doing so, the Court led legislators and courts to ‘systematically divide the country into elected districts along racial lines.’ Blacks were drawn into ‘black districts’ and given ‘black representatives;’ Hispanics were drawn into ‘Hispanic districts’ and given ‘Hispanic representatives’ and so on. That interpretation rendered Section 2 ‘repugnant to any nation that strives for the ideal of a color-blind Constitution. Today’s decision should largely put an end to this ‘disastrous misadventure’ in voting rights jurisprudence.”

“Justice Thomas’ words literally hit the nail on the head,” said J. Christian Adams. “This is exactly what we are witnessing in California’s prop 50 map redraw. Whites and Hispanics were removed from two Black Los Angeles districts, and 16 districts became 52 to 55 percent majority-minority Hispanic.”

PILF is currently challenging the constitutionality of the California Prop 50 map, under the 15th Amendment which prohibits federal and state governments from denying citizens the right to vote based on race. Its lawsuit, Noyes v Newsom has been consolidated with Tangipa v Newsom and will be heard in June.

“The California legislature crossed a red line when it redrew the map, violating Fifteenth Amendment provisions which prohibit denying the right to vote based on a citizen’s race or color,” said attorney Adams. “The US Constitution leaves no room for state officials to sort votes by race.”

The Noyes lawsuit is based on the Fifteenth Amendment, not the Fourteenth, Adams said. “The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits any election law designed or purposed ‘on account of race.’”

Noyes argues that the architects of California’s new maps might not have acted with ‘racial predominance’ to violate the Fourteenth Amendment, but instead acted with ‘racial purpose’ to violate the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Illegal predominance in the Fourteenth Amendment and illegal purpose in the Fifteenth might sound similar. But Adams explained any racial purpose violates the Fifteenth Amendment, and that’s what the Noyes case is about.”

“Prop. 50’s map drawers surgically avoided adding too many Latino voters to these black influence districts. That ensured there would never be a contested primary between black and Latino candidates.”

“The Prop. 50 map drawers deliberately created sixteen Latino districts by applying demographic data to draw districts around tight bands of Latino majorities between 52% and 55%, over and over, across California.”

Paul Mitchell, the man who drew the new congressional map, admitted in interviews to drawing district lines with intentional racial goals.

The new map deliberately kept California’s 16 Hispanic majority districts by narrowing the margin of Hispanic population in all but one district and keeping Hispanic population in a deliberately tight range of 52 to 55 percent in those districts.

The Consolidated Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief filed March 27, 2026 says:

“The California Legislature violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“VRA”), 52 U.S.C. § 10301, when it drew new congressional district lines using race as the predominant factor—specifically to protect or enhance Hispanic or black voting power—without a compelling justification backed by evidence that the VRA required such action.”

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every citizen the equal protection of the laws, and the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Clause’s central mandate is racial neutrality in governmental decision-making.

The Fifteenth Amendment provides an absolute prohibition against the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color.

The complaint says, “Noyes Plaintiffs allege that by intentionally distorting district boundaries along racial lines to preserve a specific number of Hispanic-majority districts and two black-influence districts, California violated the Fifteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Act. See U.S. Const., amend. XV, § 1; 52 U.S.C. § 10101(a).

The case will be heard June 26 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity. The Foundation exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections. Drawing on numerous experts in the field, PILF seeks to protect the right to vote and preserve the Constitutional framework of American elections.