The Supreme Court issued an emergency order on July 16 temporarily blocking a lower court ruling that prevents voters in seven states from suing over alleged discrimination under the federal Voting Rights Act.

The lower court is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh issued the new order in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe. Kavanaugh did not explain his decision. The order, known as an administrative stay, gives the nine justices more time to consider to case.

The applicants who sought the order are the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe, and three Native American voters. The respondent is Michael Howe, North Dakota’s secretary of state.

The Indian tribes had argued that an electoral map the North Dakota Legislature approved in 2021 was racially discriminatory. A federal district court agreed in January 2024 and adopted a map proposed by the tribes that was used in elections that year.

In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled the tribes had no right to sue under the Voting Rights Act and ordered the 2021 map reinstated.

The Supreme Court’s new ruling leaves the 2024 map in place for now.

The case goes back to 2021 when the applicants sued the secretary of state under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a large language minority group.

The Supreme Court interpreted Section 2 in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). The court found the section forbids laws, practices, and structures that interact “with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by black and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.”

The high court upheld Section 2 in June 2023 when it was challenged in an Alabama redistricting case known as Allen v. Milligan. The court voted 5-4 to strike down Alabama’s electoral map.

The applicants argued in their lawsuit that the state’s 2021 redistricting of seats in the state Legislature discriminated against Native Americans. They said the state placed electoral district boundary lines in a way that illegally diluted, or weakened, the voting strength of Native Americans.

Vote dilution happens when members of “a politically cohesive minority group” are concentrated in a single district or divided among several districts so they are outnumbered by a majority group in each district.

A federal district court denied the secretary’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The court ruled that the applicants could enforce Section 2 by suing under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, a federal law that allows individuals to sue the government for civil rights violations.

In November 2023, the court held that Section 2 had been violated, and blocked the secretary from proceeding with elections in several legislative districts. The court gave the Legislature about a month to draw up a new map. The Legislature failed to meet the court’s deadline, so the court adopted a map proposed by the applicants for the November 2024 election. That map combined two Indian reservations into one district that stretched diagonally across the northeastern part of the state.

The secretary appealed, arguing that the district court was wrong to find that the applicants, who were private citizens, could enforce Section 2 through a Section 1983 lawsuit. The secretary also said the district court erred when it determined that the 2021 map violated Section 2.

On May 14, a panel of the Eighth Circuit ruled 2-1 that because Section 2 does not “unambiguously confer an individual right” to sue, the applicants were not allowed to bring a Section 1983 lawsuit to enforce Section 2.

The ruling, which would have reinstated the 2021 map, was scheduled to take effect on July 17. The tribes asked the Eighth Circuit to put the order on hold but on July 10, that court declined to do so.

The tribes said in their July 15 application to the Supreme Court that North Dakota “reduced from three to one the number of legislative seats in which Native American voters in northeastern North Dakota could elect representatives of their choice.”

They said that the Eighth Circuit’s ruling and other courts’ similar rulings “knee-cap Congress’s most important civil rights statute” and are “especially harmful to Native Americans.”

“North Dakota—like many states—has a long and sad history of official discrimination against Native Americans that persists to this day,” the application said.

The Eighth Circuit’s ruling means that it is “the only Circuit in which private plaintiffs cannot enforce Section 2,” the application added.

Kavanaugh has directed the secretary to respond to the application by 5 p.m. on July 22.

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to the secretary’s office. No reply was received by publication time.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 17, 2025, in The Epoch Times.

Photo: Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh