Georgia lawmakers will reconvene in June for a special session to redraw the state’s political maps, Gov. Brian Kemp announced Wednesday. The move comes in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakened key protections under the Voting Rights Act.
Lawmakers will also be tasked with addressing an upcoming deadline to change the state’s current election system, which relies on a ballot QR code to count votes. Under a state law passed in 2024, QR codes cannot be used for the official ballot count after July 1.
Kemp broke with many other Republican-led states in the South when he announced that the state would not pursue redistricting ahead of the 2026 general election. Other states, like Alabama and Tennessee, have rushed to break up Black-majority districts since the ruling.
But the governor, who said the ruling “restores fairness to our redistricting process,” notably left the door open for redistricting ahead of the 2028 election.
“Voting is already underway for the 2026 elections, but it’s clear that Callais requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle,” Kemp said in a statement earlier this month, referring to the Louisiana v. Callais decision.
In a Wednesday proclamation announcing a special session, the governor called for redistricting to take place for Georgia’s maps for state Senate and House, Congressional districts and “any other state office elected by district.”
‘Nobody has said our maps are illegal’
Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones, an Augusta Democrat, condemned Kemp’s push to redistrict.
“If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities,” he said in a statement. “When Republicans strip Black people’s power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. They’re stripping political power from every single middle and working class person and handing it over to billionaires and big corporations.”
House Minority Leader Carolyn Hugley, a Columbus Democrat, also vowed to advance a constitutional amendment that would ban partisan gerrymandering during the special session.
“Nobody has said our maps are illegal, and the speed and urgency that Republicans have moved to redraw maps to lock-in single-party rule, indefinitely, shows why the Voting Rights Act was needed in the first place,” she said.
But Josh McKoon, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, said the special session presents an opportunity to do away with gerrymandering based on race and draw new maps that are “rooted in traditional, race-neutral principles,” such as compactness and respect for county and municipal boundaries.
“Georgians deserve fair districts that reflect the will of the voters, not artificial racial quotas or outdated mandates that divide our state along racial lines,” McKoon said.
ACLU of Georgia policy and advocacy director Christopher Bruce said that his organization had been pushing for a special session to address the issue of ballot QR codes, but was disappointed to see that Kemp had included redistricting in his proclamation. He urged voters to cast their ballots during the primary election, and to contact their elected officials to condemn the redistricting push.
“This is not something that’s new, but this is something that is nefarious beyond belief,” he said. “It is incumbent upon us, as voters in Georgia, to fight back and say, ‘we do not need new maps. We need fair maps.’”
Georgia lawmakers revised the state’s political maps in a 2023 special session after a federal judge ordered the maps to be redrawn to include one additional Black-majority congressional district, two additional Black-majority state Senate districts and five additional Black-majority state House districts. That case was appealed and is currently pending in the 11th Circuit Court.
But in the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s ruling, plaintiffs must prove there was “intentional racial discrimination” in order for gerrymandered districts to be overturned, meaning that voting rights advocates will likely have very little recourse if the state moves to eliminate those districts.
A new strategy
Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, said she expects states across the South to draw new maps under the guise of creating a partisan advantage rather than a racial one.
“It allows these states to use ‘partisan’ as the fig leaf to cover racial gerrymandering, because there is a correlation of race and political parties,” Anderson said in an interview. “You can draw the lines and say, ‘Oh no, this is about party. We just wanted to make sure that Republicans have the political power,’ when what you’re doing is basically diluting Black votes.”
But Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, said that splitting a solid Democratic district into Republican-leaning ones could come at the cost of making those Republican districts more competitive. For the past 35 years, Bullock added, Republicans have been working to consolidate minority voters into a few districts.
“This is an entirely different strategy now where [Republicans are] trying to crack rather than pack the minority vote,” Bullock said.
Bullock said that the 2nd Congressional District, currently held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, is likely a target, and that the Black population in Macon and Columbus could be split into two neighboring districts, as they were in 2010 when Bishop narrowly won against a Republican challenger.
“There is a potential risk depending upon how large a share of the Black population they removed from the 2nd district, and that it might make either the 3rd or the 8th district more competitive,” Bullock said, referring to districts currently represented by GOP U.S. Reps. Brian Jack of Peachtree City and Austin Scott of Tifton.
Attaching a redistricting proposal to a special session aimed at updating election ballot laws was likely an attempt at saving state money and lawmakers’ time, Bullock said, and at securing Republican control over redistricting in the event that Democrats make gains during November’s midterm elections.
The special session will begin on June 17, 2026, which is the day after the state’s primary election runoffs.
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