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The Republican governor of Georgia called a special session for next month to redraw electoral maps, the latest southern state to initiate new map-making after the US supreme court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

Brian Kemp announced the special session, which will start on 17 June, on Wednesday. It will focus on “enacting, revising, repealing, or amending” district lines for the state legislature and congressional district, in light of the supreme court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais.

Kemp, whose term ends next January, has said that the state will not redraw its boundaries for this year’s elections. The state’s primaries are set for next Tuesday. Instead, the redistricting special session will seek to lock in Republican-leaning maps while the party still holds power in the legislature and governor’s office.

The Republicans could seek to draw the Democratic representative Sanford Bishop, a Black member of Congress who has served since 1993, out of his seat, the Atlanta Journal Constitution noted. Other districts are less clear and could risk a “dummymander”, where an aggressive redraw backfires on the majority party.

Raphael Warnock, a Democratic US senator from Georgia, said of the push for new maps: “I will fight this with everything I have.

“There is an extreme movement in this country that will stop at nothing to hold on to power, even if it means stripping representation away from millions,” Warnock wrote on Twitter.

The supreme court ruled in April that the districts Louisiana drew in accordance with section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents racial discrimination in voting, were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Effectively, the court’s decision dilutes Black and minority voting power, a major upheaval in civil rights law.

Immediately after the decision, some states rushed to redraw their maps. Louisiana, in the midst of an ongoing election, set aside the tens of thousands of ballots already cast and sought to draw maps that eliminate a Black-majority district around Baton Rouge. Alabama got approval from the supreme court to use a map previously deemed discriminatory to Black voters. Tennessee authorized new maps that got rid of the state’s lone Democratic, Black-majority congressional district.

South Carolina, however, defied pressure from Trump to redraw its maps, voting against a plan to draw new maps. Virginia voters, meanwhile, approved a ballot measure for more Democratic-leaning districts, but the state’s supreme court threw out the map, so now the state is appealing to the US supreme court to allow the map to be used.

The racial gerrymandering frenzy ramped up an already harried mid-decade redistricting race, meaning a large number of voters will be facing new districts in this year’s elections – a historic rarity outside of the decennial census redistricting.

Redistricting typically happens every 10 years after the US census. In some states, independent commissions oversee the map-making, while in others, it’s a highly partisan process.

Starting last year, though, a raft of states pushed through new districts after Trump pressured Republican-led states to redraw maps to create House seats more favorable to their party, given the losses the GOP expect to face in this year’s midterms. Some Democratic-led states have responded in kind, remaking their maps to favor their side.

Georgia’s special legislative session will also include addressing issues related to a new law banning QR codes on ballots that is set to take effect in July.