The Florida supreme court rejected a challenge to the state’s congressional map on Thursday, a decision that weakens the influence of Black voters in the state and could make it easier to draw gerrymandered maps in the future.
The years-long legal dispute centered on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to get rid of a winding district in northern Florida where Black voters made up nearly half of the eligible voter population and had repeatedly elected Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, to Congress. When the Florida legislature redrew the map in 2021, DeSantis went out of his way to chop up the district into four different ones in which white people comprised a majority. DeSantis said at the time that the district, which stretched more than 200 miles from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, had impermissibly sorted voters based on their race.
The decision helped Republicans pick up additional seats in Florida. Thursday’s ruling is a win for Republicans, who anticipate losing seats in the US House in next year’s midterm elections.
Black voters and advocacy groups challenged the map, saying getting rid of the district violated one of several anti-gerrymandering provisions, known as the Fair Districts Amendment (FDA), approved by voters in 2010. One of those protections prohibits lawmakers from drawing districts that “diminish [racial and language minorities’] ability to elect representatives of their choice”. Eliminating a district in which Black voters were electing their preferred candidate, the plaintiffs argued, violated that provision.
A circuit court judge sided with the plaintiffs and struck down the map in May 2022. An appellate court reversed that decision.
Chief justice Carlos Muñiz, a DeSantis appointee, wrote the majority opinion and agreed that the old district was one in which Black voters could elect their preferred candidate and that the new map diminished their ability to do so. But, he added, the relevant question was whether it was possible to draw districts that complied with the non-diminishment requirement without allowing race to predominate. The plaintiffs, he said, had not proven that was possible.
“The record leaves no doubt that such a district would be race-predominant. The record also gives us no reasonable basis to think that further litigation would uncover a potentially viable remedy,” he wrote. “It is likely impossible to draw a non-diminishing district … in North Florida without subordinating the FDA’s mandatory race-neutral districting standards.”
“There’s no doubt that this opinion dramatically limits the reach of the FDA,” said Chris Shenton, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represented plaintiffs challenging the maps in a separate case.
Justice Jorge Labarga wrote in a dissenting opinion that the case should have been sent back down to a lower court where the plaintiffs should have been given the chance to prove such a map was possible. The supreme court’s Thursday decision, he wrote, “lays the groundwork for future decisions that may render the Non-Diminishment Clause practically ineffective or, worse, unenforceable as a matter of law”.
