Supreme Court will hear South Carolina racial gerrymandering case

Appeal from a three-judge panel decision in South Carolina in Alexander v. S.C. Conference of the NAACP. Earlier ELB coverage on the panel decision is here. That panel found that South Carolina’s First Congressional District was a racial gerrymander.

There’s a host of issues raised that the Court might consider, from the appeal:

(1) Whether the district court erred when it failed to apply the presumption of good faith and to holistically analyze South Carolina Congressional District 1 and the South Carolina General Assembly’s intent; (2) whether the district court erred in failing to enforce the alternative-map requirement in this circumstantial case; (3) whether the district court erred when it failed to disentangle race from politics; (4) whether the district court erred in finding racial predominance when it never analyzed District 1’s compliance with traditional districting principles; (5) whether the district court clearly erred in finding that the General Assembly used a racial target as a proxy for politics when the record showed only that the General Assembly was aware of race, that race and politics are highly correlated, and that the General Assembly drew districts based on election data; and (6) whether the district court erred in upholding the intentional-discrimination claim when it never even considered whether—let alone found that—District 1 has a discriminatory effect.

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