Alito leaned on erroneous claim that black voter turnout now tops white voter turnout, in his ruling gutting the VRA

Marc E. Elias @marceelias
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito leaned on an erroneous claim that Black voter turnout now tops white voter turnout, in his Callais v. Louisiana ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act, reports The Guardian.

___Alito wrote in the ruling that “present-day intentional racial discrimination” must now be proven in claims that state congressional maps rob minorities of opportunities to vote for their preferred candidates.

He further claimed that Black voters now have higher voter turnout rates than white voters, in his opinion that the Voting Rights Act no longer needs to correct for historic voter suppression and obstruction against minorities.

However, The Guardian found that Alito was relying on a faulty data methodology to arrive at that conclusion. Instead of comparing the turnout rates of those actually eligible to vote, Alito based his analysis on the total population over the voting age of 18.

“[The DoJ approach] is misleading because they’re including ineligible voters in the denominator,” University of Florida voting expert Michael McDonald told The Guardian. “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.”

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/scotus-used-faulty-racial-voter-turnout-data-to-shred-voting-rights-act-in-recent-ruling/

In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.

“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “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.”

But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.

The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/08/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-misleading-data-doj