In 1966, voting in Virginia's state elections came with a bill: a poll tax of $1.50 a year. That year the Supreme Court struck it down in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966). A dollar and a half sounds too small to take all the way to the highest court in the country. It wasn't, and the reason explains a surprising amount of American voting law.
This is a field guide, published on Election Day 2026, to ten Supreme Court decisions that shape who votes and how. They cover who counts as a voter, what a state may require before you cast a ballot, how your district is drawn, and who referees the rules. It ends with what has changed since this post first ran, including the Court's 2025-26 term. It takes no side in any race on today's ballot.
A small price, a large effect
In 1957 the economist Anthony Downs pointed out an awkward fact about elections. For any one person, the chance that their single vote decides the outcome is close to zero. In strictly rational terms, that means even a small cost of voting can outweigh the expected benefit. The cost might be a fee, a form, a trip across town or an hour in line. In 1968 the political scientists William Riker and Peter Ordeshook turned the idea into an equation. They added a term for the satisfaction people get from doing their civic duty, which helps explain why millions vote anyway.
The model is contested. Critics argue that the duty term does most of the work, and that real people don't calculate this way. But it is a useful lens. We usually picture the right to vote as a door that is either open or shut. Look at it another way and most of these cases are about the price at the door. They ask who sets the price, who has to pay it, and when the Constitution says it is too high or is being charged to the wrong people.
Who counts as a voter: Dred Scott and Minor
In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority held that Black Americans, free or enslaved, were not citizens of the United States and could not sue in federal court. The opinion was not mainly about ballots. But it placed Black Americans outside the political community altogether. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) reversed it by making everyone born or naturalized in the United States a citizen. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) then barred states from denying the vote on account of race.
Citizenship turned out not to be enough. In 1872 Virginia Minor, a Missouri suffragist, was refused registration. She argued that as a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment she could vote. In Minor v. Happersett (1875) a unanimous Court disagreed. It held that citizenship and suffrage are different things, and that the Constitution does not give anyone the right to vote. Earlier versions of this post said the ruling "catalyzed" the suffrage movement. That overstates it, since the movement was decades old by 1875. What Minor did was close the courtroom route and leave a constitutional amendment as the way forward. The Nineteenth Amendment came in 1920. Even now, the Constitution has no clause that grants a right to vote outright. The amendments that followed forbid denying it for particular reasons: race, sex, failure to pay a poll tax, and age for anyone 18 or older.
The workarounds and the Court's answers
After the Fifteenth Amendment, several states looked for rules that never mentioned race. Oklahoma's 1910 constitutional amendment required a literacy test. It exempted anyone who had been entitled to vote on January 1, 1866, along with their lineal descendants. Black men could not vote in most of the country on that date, so the exemption worked as a pass for white voters. In Guinn v. United States (1915) the Court held that the clause violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In the price frame, the test was a cost charged to one group and waived for another. The win was narrow, though. Literacy tests themselves stayed lawful for decades, until Congress suspended them in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later banned them nationwide.
The white primary was a different kind of workaround: it moved the gate. In the one-party South of that era, winning the Democratic primary was effectively winning the office. Texas Democrats barred Black voters from that primary, and in Grovey v. Townsend (1935) the Court accepted the arrangement on the theory that a party was a private association. Lonnie Smith, a Black dentist in Houston, was turned away from the 1940 primary. In Smith v. Allwright (1944) the Court overruled Grovey, 8-1. It held that the primary was part of the state's election machinery, so excluding voters by race violated the Fifteenth Amendment.
Harper dealt with a literal price. The Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) had banned poll taxes in federal elections, but Virginia still charged one for state elections. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice William O. Douglas held that tying the vote to wealth or to paying a fee violates the Equal Protection Clause. That is the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires states to treat people equally under the law. Harper overruled Breedlove v. Suttles (1937). For fees, the Court had set the price at zero. Other costs were treated differently. In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008) the Court upheld Indiana's photo ID law. The lead opinion found that the burden of obtaining a free ID did not outweigh the state's interests.
How the lines are drawn: Reynolds and Shaw
Some rules leave the price of voting alone and change what a vote is worth. By the early 1960s, Alabama's legislative districts still rested on the 1900 census. Rural counties with few residents had as much say as fast-growing cities. Baker v. Carr (1962) held that federal courts could hear complaints like this. Then in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), decided 8-1, Chief Justice Earl Warren held that both houses of a state legislature must be drawn substantially by population. "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres," he wrote. The same year, Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) applied a similar equal-population rule to congressional districts. This principle of one person, one vote is why districts are redrawn after every census.
Equal population does not settle where the lines go. After the 1990 census, North Carolina drew two majority-Black congressional districts. One of them, the 12th, wound along Interstate 85 and in places was barely wider than the highway. White voters sued. In Shaw v. Reno (1993), decided 5-4, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that a district so irregular it can only be understood as sorting voters by race can be challenged under the Equal Protection Clause. Such a district triggers strict scrutiny, which means the state must show a compelling reason and a closely fitted plan. Miller v. Johnson (1995) later framed the test as whether race was the predominant factor. These cases sit in tension with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which can require districts where minority voters form a majority. Partisan line-drawing is a separate question. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) the Court held that federal courts cannot hear claims that maps are too partisan, which leaves those fights to states and Congress.
Who referees the rules: Bush v. Gore, Shelby County and Brnovich
In December 2000, Florida's Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount of ballots that machines had read as having no vote for president. In Bush v. Gore (2000) the US Supreme Court stopped it. The unsigned majority opinion said that counties applying different standards to decide what counted as a vote raised an equal protection problem. Seven justices saw a problem of that kind, but only five agreed to end the recount rather than let it continue under a uniform standard. The opinion described its reasoning as limited to the circumstances of that case. Al Gore conceded the next day.
Shelby County v. Holder (2013) changed who has to prove that a rule is fair. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to get federal approval before changing any voting rule. This was called preclearance. Section 4(b) decided which places were covered, using data from the 1960s and 1970s. Splitting 5-4, the Court struck down Section 4(b) as outdated. It did not strike down Section 5, but without a coverage formula, Section 5 reaches no one. Congress could write a new formula, and as of mid-October 2026 it has not. In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg compared the decision to throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. Since Shelby, challengers must usually sue after a rule takes effect, typically under Section 2.
Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) asked how much a Section 2 claim can demand. By a 6-3 vote, the Court upheld two Arizona rules. One discarded ballots cast in the wrong precinct. The other limited who may collect and deliver another person's early ballot. Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion set out factors for courts to weigh, including the size of the burden, how much a rule departs from practice in 1982, the size of any racial disparity, and the state's interests, such as preventing fraud. Justice Elena Kagan's dissent argued that the majority had weakened the statute. In price terms, Brnovich asks how much cost is too much, and its answer leaves states more room than many challengers had argued for.
What's changed since this post first ran
The trend toward narrowing has not run in only one direction. In Allen v. Milligan (2023) the Court held 5-4 that Alabama's congressional map likely violated Section 2, which led to a second district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate. A year later, in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024), decided 6-3, the Court reversed a finding that a South Carolina district was a racial gerrymander. It told lower courts to presume that legislatures act in good faith and to separate race from partisanship carefully.
The 2025-26 term brought those threads together. Louisiana v. Callais (2026), decided April 29, 2026, grew out of Section 2 litigation. After a federal court found Louisiana's map likely unlawful, the legislature drew a second majority-Black congressional district in 2024. A group of voters challenged that district as a racial gerrymander, and a three-judge court agreed. The Supreme Court heard argument in March 2025, then ordered reargument on whether deliberately creating a second majority-minority district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment. It heard the case again in October 2025. The Court ruled 6-3 that the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that Section 2, properly read, did not require Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district, so no compelling interest justified the state's use of race. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, wrote a concurrence, and Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. By narrowing what Section 2 demands, the decision makes it harder for voters to use the law to win new majority-minority districts. The Court then made its ruling effective immediately. In late May 2026 Louisiana's legislature passed, and Governor Jeff Landry signed, a new congressional map for this year's elections, which news reports described as designed to gain a Republican seat.
Two cases concerned mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. In Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections (2026), Representative Mike Bost challenged Illinois's rule counting ballots that arrive up to 14 days late if they are postmarked on time. The lower courts held that he lacked standing, meaning the right to bring the suit at all. On January 14, 2026, the Supreme Court reversed, 7-2. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court that, as a candidate, Bost has standing to challenge the rules for counting votes in his own election, and the case went back to the lower courts. In Watson v. Republican National Committee (2026), Mississippi appealed a ruling by the federal appeals court in Republican National Committee v. Wetzel. That court had held that the federal statutes setting Election Day bar counting ballots that arrive afterward. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court reversed, 5-4. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that those statutes do not stop states from counting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive later, as Mississippi allows for up to five days. Justice Alito dissented, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch and, in part, Justice Kavanaugh. For today's election, that leaves the receipt deadline to each state's own law: some states count on-time ballots that arrive later, and others require arrival by Election Day.
On campaign money, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (2026) challenged federal limits on how much political parties may spend in coordination with their own candidates. The Court had upheld those limits in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001), before Citizens United v. FEC (2010) loosened the rules on independent spending. On June 30, 2026, the Court struck down the limits, 6-3. Justice Brett Kavanaugh's majority opinion overruled the 2001 decision and held that the coordinated-spending limits violate the First Amendment. Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.
Why it matters at the polls today
Read together, these ten cases show a shift. The early fights were about whether whole groups could vote at all, and the Constitution eventually answered those with amendments. The fights since the 1960s are about degree: how much a rule may cost a voter, how much a vote may be diluted, how much race may figure in drawing a line, and who has to prove harm. Questions of degree rarely produce clean wins. They produce tests and factors, and those get decided case by case and map by map. That is why voting rules have shifted from one election to the next, and why the rules for today's ballot may differ from the ones you voted under in 2024. Before you go, check your state election office for its current rules on ID, deadlines and mail ballots.
Sources
- Opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States, supremecourt.gov
- Justia, US Supreme Court opinions
- Oyez, case summaries and oral argument audio
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII), Constitution and US Code
- Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957)
- William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook, "A Theory of the Calculus of Voting," American Political Science Review 62, no. 1 (March 1968): 25-42
Updated November 2026.
Rewritten with AI (Claude). Not individually reviewed by an editor before publication.