A Federal court has ruled that South Carolina's First Congressional District is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, forcing the redrawing of maps before future elections are held.
The panel, consisting of three federal judges, unanimously ruled on the matter on Friday and rejected arguments that two more of the state's seven House districts were also illegally gerrymandered. They said that voting rights advocates have failed to show that their boundaries were predominantly drawn to dilute Black voting power.
South Carolina District Gerrymandering
In a statement, legal scholars said that the federal court's ruling was notable because it relied on a legal doctrine that has been largely used by conservatives to limit the creation of political districts that empower minorities and not, as in this case, to justify them.
For a long time, both local and state legislators have sought to draw political maps that give minority voters a chance to elect leaders of their choosing. This was both for moral reasons and to avoid lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act, as per the New York Times.
However, in a series of decisions dating back to the early 1990s, the United States Supreme Court has said that while mapmakers can take race into account in drawing such districts, making it the predominant factor would violate the constitutional rights of white voters.
The South Carolina ruling also embraces the predominance test to conclude that the Republican-dominated Legislature of the state deliberately barred tens of thousands of Black voters from one congressional district to another for bipartisan gain. Judges said that in doing so, they denied those voters equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
In a statement, an election-law expert at George Washington University and a senior Justice Department official during the Obama administration, Spencer A. Overton, said that the panel was flipping the opposition on its head.
According to The Hill, the federal judges ruled that after carefully weighing the evidence that has been shown, race was a predominant factor in the General Assembly's design of Congressional District No. 1.
Redrawing of Maps
The court also gave state lawmakers until Mar. 31 to submit a new map and prevented further elections from taking place in the district until the new boundaries have been approved. The district, which runs along much of South Carolina's coast, experienced a major upset that resulted in the election of former Reo. Joe Cunningham in 2018.
A resident of the district and the NAACP's South Carolina wing was responsible for challenging the new maps. They also brought claims of racial gerrymandering in two other congressional districts that the federal judges threw out.
The panel consisted of Judges Richard Gergel, Mary Geiger Lewis, and Toby Heytens and their ruling came less than two months after the case trial ended in a downtown Charleston courtroom. They described the removal of the tens of thousands of Black voters as an "exile" and said that the discriminatory map created a "stark racial gerrymander."
The judges' ruling also noted that Will Roberts, who drew the maps, used race to achieve the partisan goal of making the 1st District safer for the GOP. This kind of tactic was not allowed under federal law, The Post and Courier reported.
