With the 2026 midterm elections months away, voting rights advocates warn that new voting laws and disputes over election processes could reduce participation among millions of minority, low-income, elderly, rural and first-time voters.
A recent Supreme Court ruling, Calais v. Louisiana, has already prompted states across the South to redraw congressional district lines in ways that eliminate majority-Black seats. Meanwhile, 36 states now require some form of ID at the polls, while local election battles that once seemed like regional issues are drawing national scrutiny.
Weakened federal voting protections
A 6-3 Supreme Court majority ruling issued April 29 by Justice Samuel Alito struck down Louisiana’s congressional map containing two majority-Black districts. Voting rights groups say the decision effectively guts Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) which prohibits voting procedures that dilute minority representation. (Blacks account for more than 30% of the state’s population.)
The ruling’s new standard requires plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination — a nearly impossible burden compared to the previous standard of proving that a redistricting map gives Black voters less opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
In the weeks following the decision, several Southern states including Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina moved to redraw congressional maps — in some cases while mail-in voting for primary elections was already underway — explained Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), at a June 26 American Community Media briefing.
The changes have already eliminated “a number of majority-Black congressional seats in the South,” he continued. “This means that absent some huge wave of increased voting by voters of color, some of our long-standing Black congress members may lose their seats in November.”
A Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund analysis found that up to 191 currently Democrat-held Southern state legislative districts could be redrawn as a result of Calais — including 127 Black-majority districts, more than half of all Black-majority districts in those states.
An earlier joint report estimated that the new Section 2 standard alone could secure 19 Republican House seats. Combined with Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting efforts, the report projected a potential shift of 27 House seats — “enough to cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation.”
But at the federal level, “the president of the United States has no authority to regulate elections,” said Saenz. “Without congressional action … his executive orders have no effect. This is why Trump is pushing so hard now to get federal legislation to require voter ID, to restrict the ability to cast a remote ballot and the like, but it would require congressional action.”
Millions without voting ID
Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), discusses threats to election integrity.
As a more credible near-term threat, he pointed to the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, potentially stripping the effective ability to vote from the over 21 million Americans who lack ready access to documents like a passport or birth certificate.
While the act passed the House April 10 on a vote of 220-208, with the support of all Republicans and four Democrats, Senate passage would require seven Democratic votes, a threshold few analysts expect it to reach.
But even if passed, the measure could apply only to federal races, said Saenz, noting that implementing such a system nationwide would be “exorbitantly expensive.” It would also, he said, “consolidate federal with state and local elections in every state around the country,” resulting in “two sets of rules for one election.”
According to Saenz, the “greater danger” voters face is at the state and local levels. “The Supreme Court made Voting Rights Act challenges to such measures more difficult,” he noted, adding, “It’s important that people be prepared to have a voter ID. Even if [the ID requirement] is being challenged in court. It may or may not be resolved before the election comes around.”
Roughly half of Americans don’t have a passport, including 55% of registered Republican voters; nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens lack a current driver’s license; and another 29 million have licenses that do not reflect their current name or address.
Citizens of color are nearly four times more likely than white citizens to lack a valid, unexpired state ID, with Black and Hispanic Americans disproportionately affected.
“The ever-changing landscape of voter ID laws creates confusion for voters, who will often stay home rather than face shame or get turned away or intimidated for potentially not having the correct form of ID,” said Da Hae Kim, policy advocacy manager at national voting rights nonprofit VoteRiders.
Cost and access compound the problem.
Da Hae Kim, policy advocacy manager at VoteRiders, shares data on access to identification documents in the United States, including documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC).
“If you have a minimum wage job and it’s $7.25 an hour, and you need to pay about $29 to get an ID — if it’s a choice of putting food on the table or getting an up-to-date license — putting food on the table will likely take precedence,” Kim said, adding that rural residents frequently lack transportation to the offices where IDs are issued, and that natural disasters like floods and fire can leave many voters without any identification at all.
On the ground in Shasta County
Annelise Pierce, founder and managing editor of the independent news service Shasta Scout — which covers a deeply conservative, majority-white rural county about 2.5 hours north of Sacramento — brought these national dynamics into a community-level focus.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shasta Scout saw the county’s rightward political shift accelerate, amplified by new leaders in local government.
In early 2023, the county board voted to cut short its contract with electronic voting company Dominion Voting Systems in favor of hand-counting — a move the state blocked that fall with a quickly passed hand-counting ban.
The county registrar of voters, who oversaw 40 elections over nearly two decades, retired in mid-2024 “due to stress-related medical conditions, and eventually the board brought in a new registrar” — attorney Clint Curtis — who, Pierce said, “really marched in rhythm with these election activist complaints and started implementing a lot of changes in local election procedures.”
Among these changes was Measure B, brought forth by activists — some of them Curtis-appointed election staff — alleging local election fraud. The ballot measure, passed June 2, requires ID voting, eliminates most early voting, limits who can cast an absentee ballot, requires hand-counting of all ballots at the precinct level and severs local voter rolls from state oversight.
Annelise Pierce, founder and managing editor of Shasta Scout, discusses changes to Shasta’s voting process and how they’ve impacted access to voting and trust in elections.
The state sued the county 10 days later, maintaining that implementing the measure would violate voting laws in California, a universal vote-by-mail ballot state. But in late June, an appeals court declined to review the suit, directing California to refile in a trial court instead and ahead of the county’s July 2 primary certification date.
“You’d have to maintain two separate sets of voter rolls,” Pierce said, “one to comply with state and federal elections, and one for local elections.”
Pierce said the voting issues she has documented in Shasta have often stemmed less from deliberate intent than from inexperience and distrust of technology.
Curtis’ decision to eliminate electronic poll-pad check-in systems, for instance, produced long lines and “actual disenfranchisement of voters because there were not enough line workers at the elections office to verify voters throughout the day,” she explained. Poll worker training gaps, meanwhile, left many workers without adequate preparation to help voters with disabilities.
Pierce noted that ahead of national midterm elections, Shasta County residents still don’t know whether they’ll need to show ID or have to vote in person, with only months remaining before voters head to the polls this November.
“Elections are about process and policy, but also about optics and perception, so the voters’ own trust in what they’re seeing,” she said, “is an important part of whether or not people choose to engage in elections at all.”
