Plus: How the Utah Supreme Court protected voter-approved fair districting laws ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

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A Win Against Partisan Gerrymandering in Utah

On July 11, Utah voters scored a major victory against partisan gerrymandering when the Utah Supreme Court issued an opinion

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holding that the legislature’s gutting of anti-gerrymandering reforms approved by voters in 2018 likely violated voters’ right under the Utah Constitution to “alter or reform their government” by way of a citizen initiative, or popular ballot measure.

The court’s decision held that where voters “alter or reform the government through an initiative,” those reforms are “constitutionally protected from government infringement, including legislative amendment, repeal, or replacement of the initiative in a manner that impairs the reform enacted by the people.” The only limited exception, the court said, was where the legislature could show its changes were narrowly tailored to address a compelling state interest.

While the Utah Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower court to give the legislature a chance to offer a governmental interest for making it easier to gerrymander, advocates are celebrating the decision. According to Mark Gaber

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of the Campaign Legal Center, “This [ruling] is a sweeping victory. I’m hopeful we will prevail [on remand], and, in the end, we will have new, fair maps in Utah.”

Because the court decided that the repeal of the 2018 anti-gerrymandering reforms was likely unconstitutional, it did not reach the separate question of whether partisan gerrymandering also violated other constitutional guarantees in the Utah Constitution, including its Free Elections Clause.



Fifth Circuit Undermines Voting Rights Act



On August 1, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned long-standing precedents and held

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in a 12–6 decision that the Voting Rights Act does not permit claims for coalition districts — claims in which two or more minority groups join together to bring a collective claim challenging an electoral map.

In 2021, the Justice Department and a group of Black and Latino voters sued Galveston County, Texas, contending that the county commission’s dismantling of a voting district where Black and Latino voters together were a majority of the electorate violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

After a federal trial court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit affirmed but suggested that the circuit’s 18 judges should revisit the issue of whether Congress intended for the civil rights statute to allow coalition district claims — a question that the Supreme Court has not yet opined on. The circuit court’s decision

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in the Galveston case overturns its 1987 ruling in Campos v. City of Baytown, which allowed coalition district claims in situations where minority groups could show that they were politically cohesive.

It is not yet known whether the plaintiffs will seek review of the decision at the Supreme Court. Valencia Richardson, a Campaign Legal Center attorney representing the individual plaintiffs, told

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Houston Public Media that they “are considering next steps at this time.”



A Brennan Center friend-of-the-court

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brief in the case argued that “depriving plaintiffs of protection from a districting scheme that robs cohesive Black and Latino voters of an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice would frustrate the purpose” of the Voting Rights Act.



Featured Map: Signatures for Ohio’s Redistricting Reform Proposal by County

Redistricting reform is officially on the November ballot in Ohio.



On July 23, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose certified

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that reform advocates had submitted over 535,000 valid petition signatures, far surpassing the 413,487 signatures needed to put the measure before voters. Overall, signatures equaled nearly 13 percent of the turnout in the 2022 race for governor.





Signatures came from all 88 Ohio counties. While the largest share of signatures came out of the state’s urban centers, a quarter of the state’s counties saw signatures equal to 10 percent of the votes cast in the 2022 gubernatorial election.



Redistricting in the News

The Florida Supreme Court will hold oral argument

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on September 12 in a case contending that the dismantling of a northern Florida congressional district illegally diluted the voting power of Black voters in violation of the state’s 2010 Fair Districts Amendments. A trial court ruled in favor of the Black voters bringing the case, but on appeal, an intermediate court reversed the decision.



A panel of three federal judges has given the Mississippi legislature until the end of its 2025 session to adopt new legislative maps creating two additional Black-majority state senate districts and one additional Black-majority state house district. In early July, the judges found

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that both maps ran afoul of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because they unlawfully diluted Black voting power. Although the plaintiffs had asked for new maps to be in place in time for special elections in 2024, the schedule adopted by the court means that special elections will now take place sometime in 2025.



Black plaintiffs in Arkansas have decided

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not to ask the Supreme Court to review a controversial Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that only the federal government and not individual voters can bring lawsuits seeking to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The ACLU of Arkansas and Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP said the circuit court’s decision, in a legislative redistricting case, was “radical, wrong, and contrary of sixty years of precedent,” but said that instead of appealing, they would seek to enforce the Voting Rights Act through other avenues, including a Reconstruction-era statute allowing citizens the right to sue states for violation of their civil rights.



After four years of being blocked from office, Patrick Braxton was finally reinstated

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as mayor of Newbern, Alabama, a small rural town in the state’s Black Belt that has not had an election in nearly six decades. In 2020, Braxton was elected the town’s first Black mayor, replacing Haywood Stokes III, who had held the office since 2008. However, Braxton was blocked by local white officials from taking office. In 2022, he sued, contending that white officials’ actions violated the Voting Rights Act. After the parties reached a settlement, Braxton took office on August 3.



A federal court has approved

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a new state senate map

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in Michigan. In December 2023, a federal three-judge panel ordered the state’s independent redistricting commission to redraw the map after determining that several Detroit-area districts had been unconstitutionally drawn with excessive consideration of race. The new map will take effect with the 2026 election cycle.



In a further attack on the Voting Rights Act, Republican attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia filed a friend-of-the-court brief

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in an appeal of a lower federal court decision finding that Louisiana’s legislative maps failed to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The sweeping brief urges the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to hold that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not encompass claims seeking creation of minority opportunity districts. If adopted, the Republican attorneys generals' position would gut one of the few remaining protections for communities of color in redistricting.



The League of Women Voters of South Carolina is suing

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South Carolina in state court, alleging that Republican lawmakers violated the state constitution when they manipulated the state’s congressional district boundaries to give their party an electoral advantage in the state’s First Congressional District, the district currently represented by Republican Nancy Mace.



Redistricting Litigation

As of today, cases challenging congressional maps in 10 states and legislative maps in 11 states remain pending before trial courts or on appeal.



More information on active and resolved cases can be found at 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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