Louisiana is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to quickly certify its ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act so the state can eliminate its majority-Black districts in time for this fall’s midterms. But Black voters argue that time-table would violate a key legal principle that courts shouldn’t change voting rules and maps so close to the election, because of the risk of voter confusion.

The principle, known as Purcell, has been embraced by several members of the court’s conservative majority.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R ) last week declared an “emergency” suspension of the state’s U.S. House of Representatives primary election in light of the Supreme Court’s  ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, saying the order gives the state permission to immediately redraw its congressional district maps.

However, in a brief filed with SCOTUS, civil rights groups contend that under the court’s own history of applying “the Purcell principle,” it is too late into the election season to suspend it.

More than 100,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to Louisiana voters, and early voting began on May 2. 

Suspending “the primary after ballots have already been cast would cause chaos in th election process and leave voters and candidates hopelessly confused, in clear violation of the principles this Court articulated in Purcell and subsequent decisions,” wrote the civil rights groups in their appeal. 

The brief references the 2020 Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature ruling. 

“The Court’s precedents recognize a basic tenet of election law: When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road should be clear and settled … because running a statewide election is a complicated endeavor,” that ruling held. 

While SCOTUS’ Callais ruling has been rendered, there’s still a 32-day period before the justices certify the judgement and send it back to the lower court where the case originated. The defendants also have a 25-day window to seek a re-hearing of the case. 

The governor’s suspension of the U.S. House elections jumps ahead of that certification deadline, in order to expedite a map that will remove Black representation and give the GOP even more of an advantage.

“Such a drastic action is unnecessary and unwarranted,” reads the civil rights groups’ appeal. “This Court should therefore clarify that the judgment has not issued and the stay remains in place until it does” – in other words, state lawmakers need to wait until SCOTUS officially hands judgement down to the lower court before proceeding with redistricting plans. 

Speaking at a press conference today, Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.), whose own majority-Black district is endangered under the Callais ruling, said he’s encouraging voters to continue casting ballots during the current early voting period, which ends May 9. 

However, President Donald Trump is actively calling for Louisiana, and other states such as Alabama that are chomping at the bit to erase Black districts from their maps, to cancel or nullify current elections. 

In Louisiana’s case, that would mean people who’ve already cast ballots would then have to vote again once new maps are drawn. 

“I think that people are too caught up into what the President says,” said Rep. Fields, who has joined one of several lawsuits filed to stop the elections suspension. “He says, ‘I need 20 more seats, you know, let’s do it! We’ve got a ruling, so let’s go!’ But at the end of the day, the Supreme Court did not say, ‘Halt the election,’ nor should it. And we’re going to let the Supreme Court make a decision fairly soon about whether or not Louisiana can do what it did.”

SCOTUS ruled in a 2006 voting case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, that courts should not interfere or change a state’s voting rules too close to an election, to prevent mass voter confusion. That kind of confusion could itself become a form of voter suppression or intimidation, for those fearful that sudden changes could lead to them getting penalized for voting incorrectly. 

There is some vagueness around the question of how close to an election is too close when applying this principle. However, in the Louisiana case, the situation has already moved too close for comfort, the Black voters argue.  “Appellants understand that many voters across the state have already voted and returned those ballots,” reads the appeals brief. 

According to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s early voting report, nearly 80,000 votes had been cast as of May 3. However, Secretary of State Nancy Landry (R) announced on April 30 that her office would post notices on early voting sites telling voters that the U.S. House race has been suspended. 

“While the U.S. House races will remain on voters’ ballots, any votes cast in those races will not be counted,” said Landry.

Rep. Fields is imploring people to continue voting anyway. 

“Don’t listen to the governor, don’t listen to the Secretary of State about not voting the entire ticket,” said Rep. Fields. “That election is suspended for now, but that doesn’t mean that it will be suspended tomorrow. There are other recourses that can be taken, and we’ve taken those recourses.”

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

Louisiana has already experienced population loss in recent years, and this trend will accelerate in a disordered way, the paper warns, should no action be taken to confront the perils faced by its largest city and surrounding communities.

“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates and pumps erected after 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. But the growing threats to the city mean the levees, which already require hefty upgrades to remain sufficient, will not be able to save the city in the long run, the new paper warns.

“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University and one of the paper’s five co-authors.

“How long is not certain but it’s most likely decades rather than centuries. Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered. It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”

City, state and federal leaders should begin work to help support people moving away from the New Orleans region in a coordinated way, starting with the most vulnerable communities, such as those in Plaquemines parish who live outside the levee system, Keenan said.

“New Orleans is in a terminal condition, and we need to be clear with the patient that it is terminal,” he said. “There is an opportunity for palliative care, we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this.”

But, he added, “no politician wants to first give this terminal diagnosis. They will speak about it behind closed doors, but never in public.”

New Orleans faces obvious challenges – situated in a bowl-shaped basin below sea level, the city already has 99% of its population at major risk of severe flooding, the worst exposure of any US city according to a separate study released last week.

“Even compared to all other US cities, New Orleans really stands out, which is alarming,” said Wanyun Shao, a co-author of this study and a geographer at the University of Alabama.

“There is no specific timeline to how long New Orleans has left but we know it’s in big trouble. They are facing one of the highest sea level rises in the world and I don’t know how long human effort can fight against that tide. It’s like a timebomb.”

Shao said she concurred that relocation of people would have to take place. “I know it’s a politically and emotionally charged issue, there are people with a deep attachment to New Orleans,” she said. “But managed retreat, no matter how unappealing it may be, is the ultimate solution at some point.”

A major pressure upon this southern cultural hotspot is that its surrounding land is briskly receding. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 sq miles of land to coastal erosion, equivalent to the size of Delaware, with a further 3,000 sq miles set to vanish over the next 50 years. The rate of land loss is so rapid that a football pitch-sized area is wiped out every 100 minutes.

To help counter this, Louisiana last decade settled upon a new sort of plan that eschewed building yet more flood defenses and instead sought to harness the Mississippi River’s natural ability to rebuild land. Levees and other infrastructure have, until now, straitjacketed the naturally meandering Mississippi and pushed the sediment it carries straight into the Gulf of Mexico, rather than replenish the coastal wetlands.

The so-called Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, which broke ground in 2023, would help restore a more natural flow in the Mississippi Delta and allow sediment to build up in coastal areas where it has been lost. More than 20 sq miles of new land would be created over the next 50 years under the plan, the project estimated.

However, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Republican governor, scrapped the project last year, arguing its $3bn cost was too high and that it threatened the state’s fishing industry. “This level of spending is unsustainable,” Landry said at the time, adding that the project imperiled the livelihoods of “people who have sustained our state for generations”.

Proponents of the project, which was funded via a settlement from BP over the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, decried the decision as disastrous for the state, pointing out fishing communities will need to move anyway because of worsening erosion.

Garret Graves, a Republican former Congressman who once led the state’s coastal restoration agency, said Landry was guilty of a “boneheaded decision” that will “result in one of the largest setbacks for our coast and the protection of our communities in decades”.

According to the new research paper, the loss of the sediment diversion plan “effectively means giving up on extensive portions of coastal Louisiana, including the New Orleans area”.

A legal bid to force oil and gas companies to pay for damage to Louisiana’s coastline, meanwhile, is also in doubt. This month, the US supreme court allowed the fossil fuel industry to federally contest a state jury decision that Chevron pay $740m to remedy harm caused to wetlands by dredging canals, drilling wells and dumping wastewater.

“The combination of these decisions is driving a scenario where the state has stopped trying to build land,” Keenan said. “That just accelerates the timeline. They could be buying time, but that option is foreclosed now, meaning it’s a certainty the New Orleans levees will fail again multiple times. The flood water will have nowhere else to go.”

While the US has never wholesale moved a major city before, numerous communities have relocated for economic reasons in the past, with some now being shifted due to the climate crisis, too. In Louisiana, the government could start planning and building appropriate infrastructure in safer areas on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, the large estuary that sits to the north of New Orleans, Keenan said.

“This could be an opportunity for New Orleans to help migrate people further north, invest in long-term infrastructure and make that sustainable,” Keenan said.

“That exodus has already begun, so if nothing is done, people will just trickle out over time and it will be an uncoordinated mess. The market will speak as people won’t be able to get insurance. Louisiana has to stop the bleeding and acknowledge this is happening. But at the moment there is no plan.”

Timothy Dixon, an expert in coastal environments at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the new paper, said the study “does a nice job” of highlighting the challenge Louisiana faces with subsiding land combined with rising sea levels.

“New Orleans is not going to disappear in 10 years or anything like that, but policymakers really should’ve thought about a relocation plan a century ago,” said Dixon, whose own research has recommended a measured retreat from coastal Louisiana.

“Governments may not have the ability to just command people to leave, but people will volunteer to move and we are seeing that already. I’m not optimistic our political system is capable of dealing with this stuff, it will take leadership and unpopular decisions. Also, many people don’t want to move. They love where they are born.”

Landry’s office was contacted for comment but did not respond.