The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority dealt a blow to the political power of the nation’s growing communities of color...

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The Supreme Court Greenlights Racial Discrimination

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority dealt a blow to the political power of the nation’s growing communities of color last week when it made it substantially easier for states to invoke allegedly partisan motives to defend against suits seeking to overturn racially discriminatory maps.

The ruling

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was written by Justice Samuel Alito in a case from South Carolina and effectively creates a partisan “get out of jail free” card for states, requiring voters of color challenging racially discriminatory maps to show that it would have been possible to achieve the same partisan advantages as the state’s map without targeting minority voters — a challenging task in regions of the country, such as the South, where race and party heavily overlap. (Despite this well-known overlap, Justice Alito’s opinion miscites

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Brennan Center research to argue that differential racial turnout somehow rendered racial data unhelpful in map drawing. “Quite the opposite

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,” wrote Senior Research Fellow Kevin Morris in an online reply.)

The Brennan Center’s Kareem Crayton called the ruling “distressing

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,” explaining to the Washington Post that for minority voters “the ruling will make it harder to challenge districts because of the amount of evidence they will need to obtain” to defeat a racially discriminatory map.

Writing in an op-ed, the Brennan Center’s Michael Li said the ruling only served to highlight the urgency

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of passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, two transformative bills that would protect the country’s emerging multiracial democracy by, among other things, cutting off the partisan gerrymandering loophole embraced by the conservative justices. “If the Roberts court is unable or unwilling to lead us there, then Congress must,” he wrote.



The Fight for Fair Maps in Ohio



A nonpartisan coalition of Ohioans from across the political spectrum hopes to amend

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the state constitution to create an independent citizen redistricting commission. Signature gathering closes July 3, by which time the campaign will need to have collected at least 413,487 valid signatures to earn a spot on the November ballot.

Under Ohio’s current redistricting process, maps can be passed along party lines, allowing the majority party to adopt maps that are wildly skewed in their favor. Although Ohio courts can strike down gerrymandered maps, state law prevents courts from implementing a fair alternative on their own. This decade, that’s led to elected officials brazenly defying court orders and repeatedly replacing one gerrymander with another.

If passed, the citizen commission would draw new maps for the 2026 midterms.

According to former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor

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, a Republican who voted against party lines to strike down unconstitutional district lines, the maps “clearly opened the door so that a supermajority will be established, and once that happens, unless there’s a change, such as the constitutional amendment that’s going to be on in November, this is self-perpetuating.” This assessment comes alongside a recent Brennan Center analysis

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which found over 9 million Ohioans — 77 percent of the state — live in legislative districts whose representatives have been all but chosen before November.

A new Brennan Center explainer

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provides a detailed breakdown of how the amendment would work.



Featured Map — Louisiana Congressional Districts

For the first time in three decades, Black Louisianians will vote this November using a congressional map with two Black-majority districts. Before the new map, Black Louisianans had been able to elect their preferred candidates in only one of six congressional districts, despite constituting nearly a third of the Pelican State’s population.

After a federal district court struck down the map as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, Black plaintiffs proposed creating a compact new Black district on the eastern side of the state — District 5 in the map below.



However, because the proposed map would eliminate the seat of Julia Letlow, a favored Republican incumbent, Louisiana lawmakers instead enacted the map below, transforming District 6, the seat of less favored Republican incumbent Garrett Graves into a sprawling Black-majority district running from Baton Rouge in the southeast of the state to Shreveport, near its border with Texas.

State officials said that politics drove their decisions, not race, but white voters argued in a different district court that the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A three-judge panel agreed with the white plaintiffs, striking down the map. However, the Supreme Court stayed the ruling, saying it was too late to change the map for the 2024 elections. Further appeals will decide what map will be used in 2026 and subsequent elections.



Redistricting in the News

North Dakota has asked

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the U.S Supreme Court to review a lower federal court ruling ordering the state to create two legislative districts centered around Native American reservations. North Dakota argues that the lower court’s order under the Voting Rights Act creates tensions with limitations on racial gerrymandering in the U.S. Constitution that the high court needs to resolve.



The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments

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on May 14 in an important case out of Galveston, Texas, on whether the Voting Rights Act allows a coalition of two or more racial minorities to aggregate their numbers when seeking creation of a majority-minority district under the VRA. The Brennan Center filed a friend-of-the-court brief

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in support of the group of Black and Latino plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit challenging local district maps as discriminatory against both groups.



Minnesota enacted an historic omnibus elections bill

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that, among other things, puts an end to prison gerrymandering

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, requiring instead that state and local governments count incarcerated individuals at their last known address for purposes of redistricting rather than at the jail or prison where they are held.



The Biden administration ordered major changes

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to the way the census and other federal surveys ask about race and ethnicity. The changes include the addition of a new “Middle Eastern/North African” ethnicity category and the combination of currently separate questions about race and Hispanic ethnicity into a single question. Both changes had long been sought by advocates for Latino and Middle Eastern communities. A Brennan Center analysis explains

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how the new survey standards will produce higher quality data better reflecting a diversifying country’s racial and ethnic demographics.



The House passed a bill

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that would require the Census Bureau to exclude noncitizens from the numbers used to apportion congressional seats among states each decade. Although the bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, it is one of at least a dozen

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bills filed by Republican lawmakers this session of Congress that would change how noncitizens are treated for purposes of the census.





Redistricting Litigation Tracker

To date, this decade’s congressional and legislative maps have been challenged in 28 states. Of these challenges, litigation remains pending over congressional maps in 10 states and over legislative maps in 12 states.

More information on active and resolved cases can be found in the Brennan Center’s redistricting litigation tracker

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You can find earlier editions of our Redistricting Roundup here

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