Roll Call: State courts continue redrawing maps, as Supreme Court backs off
Roll Call: State courts continue redrawing maps, as Supreme Court backs off
Hours after the federal Supreme Court let Alabama keep in place a congressional map that a lower court found in violation of the Voting Rights Act, Ohio’s Supreme Court struck down for a second time its state map on gerrymandering grounds.
The Ohio court ordered its legislature to try a third time to redraw its district lines. The ruling came just days after the high court in North Carolina similarly rejected its state’s congressional map and ordered boundaries redrawn.
With more than 20 redistricting cases still pending, any other orders to redraw congressional maps are likely to emerge from state courts, after the Supreme Court seemingly bowed out in Monday’s decision on Alabama. There, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion, argued against redrawing the state’s map because there wasn’t enough time before its May 24 primary. …
In state courts, litigants have found success in an arena the Supreme Court removed itself from: partisan gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that federal courts could not consider partisan gerrymandering claims because they were best left to the states. So far this year, challengers to GOP-drawn maps have used that to their advantage in Ohio and North Carolina courts. …
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court issued a 4-3 ruling requiring the state to draw a new map with a partisan breakdown more closely resembling the state’s overall voting results.
Critics of the map argued it diluted the power of minority voters. Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, one of the map’s challengers, told reporters on a call Wednesday that the state wants to be “the leader of the path forward to a better way with regards to redistricting.”
“We watched all this train wreck and simply decided we could not sit back and see racist gerrymandered maps locked in for the next decade that will ensure one party in power at the expense of voters of color,” Phillips said. …
Riggs said the governor’s map would have violated the state’s fair districts constitutional amendments, an avenue for state courts to address partisan gerrymandering explicitly left open by the Supreme Court.
“We understand the way that race is a proxy for partisanship and partisanship sort of puts a target on the back of voters of color,” Riggs said.