This is the Tom Hartman Program.

This is the Tom Hartman Program.

I'm Jefferson Smith.

One of the stories that I wanted to make sure to cover was the recent court decision that undercut the Voting Rights Act.

But I wanted to do it with somebody with some expertise so we could dig into it a little bit.

And thankfully thankfully we have

karem. Creighton from the Brennan Center, senior director of

voting rights representation at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Let's go straight to karem first by welcoming you. Thank you so much for

joining us.

Pleasure be with you. Thanks for having.

So first, let's give the facts.

Give us a little background of the case and how it went down.

Sure. Well, this is a case out of the 8th Circuit which includes states like Arkansas going all the way up north to North Dakota and Minnesota.

And it is a district court case in which plaintiffs were actually suing under Section 2 of the Voting Rights

Act, which is a long established provision of law that allows plaintiffs who want to take

to federal court a claim that their rights to fair representation were infringed

upon.

In this law, it's sort of framed as if your votes are diluted as a minority community, you go to court, make a showing that the laws in this case a

redistricting plan doesn't accurately provide opportunity to elect candidates of choice.

There's a whole organized framework to prove that.

You go to court, you make your plan either win or lose. In this case we had a bit of

...