A prominent voting rights attorney warned Sunday that an upcoming Supreme Court decision could create a "five-alarm fire" for voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Marc Elias, founder of the Elias Law Group, discussed the Supreme Court's upcoming decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could determine whether states are allowed to racially gerrymander their election maps, during an episode of the "Democracy Watch" podcast with progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen.

The Callais case concerns Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires states with a history of creating racially discriminatory voting maps to have any new ones "pre-cleared" by the Department of Justice before they go into effect. The state of Louisiana challenged this statute after a federal court prohibited it from using an election map passed by the state legislature in 2022 that included just one majority-Black district, even though a third of the state's population is Black.

Oral arguments for the case are set to begin on October 15.

Elias laid out the potential impact of the case on "Democracy Matters."

"This is a five-alarm fire," Elias said, who said the case has the potential to be "catastrophic."

"If Section Two is struck down, what it means is that Texas will be able to go back and redistrict again and destroy a bunch of districts where right now Black voters and Hispanic voters are able to elect their candidates of choice," he continued.

"It means in Alabama and Louisiana and in Mississippi and in Florida and in Georgia and in South Carolina, just to name a few of the [districts] that have historically been created to protect Black voters from again being diluted," he added. "Those districts would no longer be protected under federal voting rights law. It could have a swing on the partisan level of 20 or 30 districts."

"This is really the whole ballgame as you look at cases pending before the Supreme Court this term," he said.