Yesterday was another terrible day for voting rights. Ten days before the Alabama primary election, the Supreme Court stripped Black voters of a congressional district they had won in court. I was not surprised. I was outraged.

Acting on an emergency petition by Alabama, the Court vacated an injunction against a congressional map that had been found to violate the Constitution. It did so on the shadow docket, without full briefing or oral argument — the same procedural shortcut the Court has increasingly used to put its thumb on the scale against voting rights.

This was not the inevitable result of the Callais case, nor was it preordained by some newly developed legal doctrine. The decision ultimately required the Court to ignore the constitutional rights of Black voters — and to apply a blatant double standard about when, and for whom, courts may alter congressional maps close to an election.

The facts speak for themselves.

In February 2022, when Black voters in Alabama faced an unconstitutional map that denied them two congressional districts, the Supreme Court said it was too close to the May primary to provide relief. Yet last week, when Alabama asked the Court to eliminate one of those same districts, the Court approved the request — with the primary election only 10 days away.

The Court took similar action in Callais, expediting the effect of its ruling to allow Louisiana to cancel an ongoing congressional election. As a result, the state was able to redraw its maps to remedy what the Court found were violations of white voters' constitutional rights.

Together, these decisions reveal the same pattern: urgency for white voters, delay for Black voters.

At the heart of these cases is the Purcell principle — the idea that courts should avoid changing voting or election rules too close to an election. It is a doctrine with no grounding in law or the Constitution, and one that conservatives on the Supreme Court have wielded all too often to advantage white voters and Republicans at the expense of Black voters and Democrats.

To be honest, the Purcell principle never made sense. It lacks clear standards, consistent application, and constitutional foundation.

In its original form, it was aimed at preventing court orders that "result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls." But it rapidly expanded into something far broader: a tool to block any court order that might protect voting rights near an election, while allowing anti-voting measures to proceed unchallenged.

Consider what the Court did during the 2020 presidential primaries. As the attorney for the Democratic National Committee, I sought to expand voting by mail in Wisconsin, while the Republican National Committee fought to limit it — at the height of a deadly pandemic, without a reliable test, treatment or vaccine.

After we won a hard-fought case, the Supreme Court deployed Purcell to reverse it, writing that courts "should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election."

I was struck at the time by the word "ordinarily." If there was ever an extraordinary circumstance, it was a statewide election held in April 2020 while COVID was raging.

But I also noticed something else: the Court specified this was only a limitation on lower federal courts. That made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. If last-minute changes to election rules harm voters and election officials, the injury is no lesser when the order comes from the Supreme Court itself.

The Court was quietly carving out a permission structure for itself — one it has since used aggressively.

In the 2022 Alabama redistricting case, the plaintiffs believed they were clear of any Purcell concern. Unlike in Wisconsin, the case was not decided on the eve of an election. By the time the unconstitutional map was enjoined, Election Day was still nearly four months away. The primary had barely begun.

Yet the Supreme Court blocked the Black voters’ victory anyway. Writing for three justices, Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that "when an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled," and that "late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences."

Then, in December 2025, the Court blocked another victory, striking down Texas's new congressional map, in part because the district court had "improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign." At the time, the Texas congressional primary was still three months away.

The pattern is unmistakable. In case after case, the window in which courts may act to protect Democrats and Black voters has been shrunk to nearly nothing. Meanwhile, the Court has moved with urgency to protect maps that favor white voters and Republican candidates, even when doing so required acting closer to an election than it had previously deemed acceptable.

It is impossible to view this honestly without concluding that the Court has not been applying a neutral principle. It has been choosing sides.

The Purcell principle was always a legal fiction applied selectively. But we are now beyond mere inconsistency. The Court has used the Purcell principle to erode any trust that there is any principle at all

I realize that few lawyers want to name what is happening as bluntly as I have. They fear blowback or disapproval from other lawyers and the legal establishment.

But ignoring reality doesn’t make the problem disappear. The Supreme Court has decided, case by case, that the Constitution's guarantee of equal political power does not apply equally to everyone. That is a crisis for the court and our democracy.

The Purcell principle didn't create this crisis. The Supreme Court did — and Purcell has become its weapon of choice.

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