As the Warren Supreme Court wisely declared in the famous voting rights case Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), which established the One Person/One Vote rule, “the weight and worth of the citizens’ votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same.” In other words, the weight and worth of all votes cast in our elections must be, in practice, equal in value.

Unwisely, the Roberts Supreme Court has decided all voters and their votes are equal but some voters and their votes ‘may’ be more equal than others.

In effect, the Roberts Court turned the One Person/One Vote Rule on its head in the case of Rucho v. Common Cause (2019). In this case, the Court indiscriminately allowed politically-partisan gerrymandering to play a key role in our elections for congressional representatives, by claiming the Court lacked the authority to prohibit it.

By definition, politically-partisan gerrymandering manipulates the boundaries of electoral constituencies within states to achieve a predetermined election result. By design, it devalues the worth of some voters and their votes in favor of other voters and their votes. In states where this has a racially discriminatory impact, the “weight and worth” of African-American voters are treated unequally in violation of the One Person/One Vote Rule.

Up until recently, the primary law relied upon to undo such discriminatory treatment was the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which tracked the original intent of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the wording of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government or any state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

But all that changed on April 29th of this year when, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Roberts Court ruled, as unconstitutional, a racially-gerrymandered voting-district designed to undo the discriminatory impact of the state majority-party’s congressional map. By doing so, the Court effectively eliminated the primary means of righting the wrong of voting-rights discrimination through partisan gerrymandering by state-majority, political parties, in elections for our congressional representatives.

Maurice F. Baggiano, J.D., published legal author, former adjunct faculty member at Gannon University (Erie, PA) and the Rochester Institute of Technology, member of the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a Jamestown resident.