Yesterday a federal district court rejected the remedial map the City of Jacksonville adopted in an effort to cure racial gerrymandering violations in its original city council plan. Instead the court ordered the use of one of the remedial maps offered by the plaintiffs (who are represented by Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic, the ACLU of Florida, and the Southern Poverty Law Center). Two points are particularly notable about the court’s decision. First, the court held that, in assessing racial gerrymandering remedies, it can be probative to group certain districts. Jacksonville’s heavily Black districts were collectively almost identical in the city’s remedial map as in its original plan, even though each of these districts individually changed quite a bit. That collective continuity helped to show that the original violations hadn’t been fully cured. Second, the court held that reliance on nonracial criteria like incumbent protection and partisan advantage can perpetuate racial gerrymandering if these criteria have the effect of largely preserving the structure of the original unlawful plan. That’s exactly what happened in Jacksonville: to protect incumbents, maintain the original plan’s partisan balance, and avoid disrupting districts that weren’t invalidated, the remedial map had no choice but to closely resemble the original unlawful plan. Some key excerpts from the decision are below:
[T]he vast majority of Black residents living in the Packed Districts under the Enjoined Plan remain in one of the Packed Districts under the Remedial Plan. And, to the extent the City Council did move some residents out of the Packed Districts and into a Stripped District, those residents were disproportionately White. In addition, the shapes of the Remedial Challenged Districts and the core retention data show that the City Council largely left the core of Districts 2, 12, and 14 unchanged while Districts 7, 8, 9 and 10, wedged between them, are significantly reconfigured but largely among themselves. While the City points to the significant changes to the boundaries of Districts 7, 8, 9, and 10, as evidence that the Remedial Plan does not perpetuate the constitutional infirmities of the Enjoined Plan, see Reply at 35, this evidence merely supports what Plaintiffs contend: that White voters largely remain in Districts 2, 12, and 14, and “Black voters are shuffled among—but not out of—the Packed Districts.” . . .
[W]hile the City is correct that it made extensive revisions to Districts 7, 8, 9, and 10, it appears that the City failed to make meaningful ones—it failed to actually remedy the effects of the racial gerrymandering discussed in the Court’s Preliminary Injunction Order. The voice of Black voters largely remains unchanged in that it is still confined to the Packed Districts that were the four historically majority minority districts. It is exceedingly difficult to see how repacking the same Black voters into a new configuration of the same four districts corrects, much less completely corrects, the harmful effects of the City’s decades-long history of racial gerrymandering. . . .
[T]he legislative history unequivocally establishes that the City’s failure to unpack Districts 7, 8, 9, and 10 stems from the high priority the City placed on protecting incumbents and candidates during the redistricting process, and relatedly, maintaining the Council’s partisan balance. . . .
[U]nder the circumstances of this case, the City’s insistence on protecting incumbents embedded, rather than remedied the effects of the unconstitutional racial gerrymandering described in the Court’s Preliminary Injunction Order. . . .
Despite the City’s insistence that its mapmakers started from “scratch,” the mapmakers were constrained from the outset by the need to separate incumbents—oddly including even those who were not eligible or had declared their intention not to run again as incumbents to be protected. By making this factor a priority, even for incumbents who were not able or intending to run again, the City all but guaranteed that the unconstitutional effects of the Enjoined Plan and its predecessors would be carried forward into the Remedial Plan.