The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a decades-old precedent that allows different racial and ethnic groups to form coalitions to seek legal remedies under the Voting Rights Act. The ruling will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2021, the Republican-majority government of Galveston County, Texas redrew its political boundaries to eliminate the one district in which non-white voters represented a majority. A group of current and former officeholders sued, charging that violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial gerrymandering. They were joined by multiple civil rights groups and the Biden administration, in a case that was consolidated as Petteway v. Galveston County.
The county argued that neither Blacks nor Latinos alone constituted an outright majority anywhere in its boundaries and that Section 2 does not protect the rights of different racial or ethnic groups to form coalitions.
On Thursday, the U.S. 5th Circuit ruled 12-5 in favor of Galveston County, throwing out a precedent its own judges had set in 1988, Campos v. City of Baytown.
Tag Archives: Voting Rights Act
“The Riddle of Race-Based Redistricting”
New scholarship by Travis Crum forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review—abstract below. Congrats on a great placement Travis!
In the redistricting context, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause in diametrically opposite ways, subjecting mapmakers to competing hazards of liability. Vote dilution doctrine requires mapmakers to consider race to ensure that racial minorities are not packed or cracked into districts. Congress, moreover, has endorsed and expanded vote dilution doctrine in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. By contrast, racial gerrymandering doctrine triggers strict scrutiny if mapmakers subordinate traditional redistricting principles to race. Thus, racial gerrymandering claims threaten Section 2’s constitutionality.
To resolve this doctrinal riddle, this Essay examines whether, as originally understood, the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments governed the use of race during redistricting. Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment was understood to exclude political rights. By contrast, the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men nationwide. The Reconstruction Framers argued over whether it also protected the right to hold office, but they barely referenced redistricting while debating the Fifteenth Amendment.
This Essay then turns to post-ratification evidence to ascertain original understanding. It begins by examining the Reconstruction Congress’s enforcement acts, none of which directly addressed the use of race during redistricting. This Essay also excavates redistricting plans enacted by Southern States during the 1870 and 1880 redistricting cycles, finding that Republican States sought to empower Black voters, whereas Democratic States packed and cracked Black voters.
This Essay argues that, from an originalist perspective, vote dilution and racial gerrymandering claims are improperly grounded in the Equal Protection Clause. This Essay further contends that, under the Fifteenth Amendment, there is some historical evidence in favor of vote dilution claims but virtually no historical support for racial gerrymandering claims. The upshot is that Congress could enact Section 2 pursuant to its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement authority to protect the right to vote and hold office.
“Newbern, Alabama Will Hold First Election Since 1965”
A federal judge signed off Tuesday on the settlement agreement reached in Newbern, Alabama in Mayor Patrick Braxton’s case, officially giving him all mayoral powers and privileges after being blocked from office by the previous white town leaders. . .
In addition to forcing Braxton’s predecessors to give him access to official documents and allow him into the town hall, which they physically locked him out of, the settlement agreement establishes that the town will hold its first election since 1965 next year . . .
Newbern, a small majority-Black town, has not had a mayoral election in almost 60 years and instead has the current mayor appoint the next mayor.
“Election law violates rights of voters with disabilities in Ohio, judge rules”
A federal judge in Ohio struck down parts of Ohio’s 2023 election law changes, ruling on Monday the law violates the rights of voters with disabilities in the state. . .
The law, which went into effect April 2023, barred anyone who is not an election official or mail carrier from possessing or returning the absentee ballot for voters with disabilities, with the exception of [qualifying] family members.
Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan, in a ruling Monday, pointed to Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, stating it allows a disabled voter “to select a person of their choice to assist them with voting,” including the return of a ballot.
“Why Voting Rights Act faces new wave of dire threats in 2024”
As 2023 comes to a close, the Voting Rights Act is facing a series of dire threats that could significantly weaken the landmark civil rights law.
A suite of three different pending cases could gut the ability of private plaintiffs to challenge the Voting Rights Act, make it harder to challenge discriminatory election systems, and limit the Voting Rights Act’s protections in areas where a single racial minority doesn’t constitute a majority.
“Here are the redistricting disputes shaping the battle for House control”
Election Day 2024 may still be 11 months away, but the first stage of the battle over control of the House is underway, with redistricting fights being waged in courtrooms from Louisiana to New York.
In a dozen states, congressional maps drawn after the 2020 Census have been challenged under federal voting rights law and the U.S. Constitution, leading to drawn-out legal battles in some states over the redistricting plans they began crafting in 2021. Disputes in Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, in particular, have been closely watched, as Democrats could pick up a seat in each of the states.
“All are places where districts are at play, and it still remains unclear in a lot of these places whether there are changes that will result in Republican-drawn gerrymanders being undone,” said Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“Legal challenges to the Voting Rights Act continue into the new year”
Hansi Lo Wang on NPR:
The landmark Voting Rights Act has had a wild year in the courts. In 2024, ongoing legal challenges are threatening to make it harder to protect the voting rights of people of color (4-minute listen).
“Federal judges order 13 Michigan House and Senate districts redrawn”
Opinion here, and excerpt below from the Detroit News:
Lansing — Federal judges have declared 13 of Michigan’s House and Senate districts unconstitutional and ordered them redrawn, overturning a key portion of the maps drawn in 2021 by Michigan’s inaugural Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission.
The three-judge panel ordered the Secretary of State to refrain from holding elections in those districts until they are redrawn in compliance with the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. . . .
“We’re thrilled that the court unanimously ruled that the challenged districts are illegal and that Black voters in Detroit were disenfranchised,” said John Bursch, an attorney for the Black Detroiters who challenged the maps. . . .
[P]laintiffs have argued that the experts guiding the commission consistently pressured its members to lower the number of Black voters in Metro Detroit House and Senate districts out of an effort to “unpack” past districts and achieve better partisan fairness scores across the state.
The result, the plaintiffs argued, was a dilution of the Black vote across spaghetti-like districts that stretched from majority-Black Detroit into majority-White suburbs in Oakland and Macomb counties.
The Voting Rights Act requires that when there is a large, compact minority — such as the Black population in Detroit — those voters cannot be broken up into largely White districts where their votes are diluted and where they are unable to elect a minority-preferred candidate.
The Equal Protection Clause largely bars states from drawing district maps that sort voters primarily by race.
Michigan’s redistricting case is unique because, unlike processes led by the majority party of the Legislature, the citizens commission documented every decision in a transcript that runs about 10,000 pages, noted Kethledge, an appointee of Republican former President George W. Bush. That transcript is quoted continuously throughout the federal court ruling. . . .
In many cases, the commission lowered the Black voting age population between 35% and 45% for legislative districts in a city whose African American population is nearly 78%, with little to no primary data showing a Black-preferred candidate could make it through a primary with those concentrations.
Hat tip: Derek Clinger of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School
“Judge pledges quick turnaround on Georgia redistricting maps”
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones took nearly two years to issue his October order that struck down Georgia’s political maps. He’s working on a far tighter deadline to render his verdict on redrawn congressional and legislative maps.
Jones said during a Wednesday hearing that state officials informed him redistricting must be completed by Jan. 16 to be ready for next year’s voting. Later, state attorney Bryan Tyson said elections staffers need the maps by Jan. 29.
“Voting rights groups file sweeping lawsuit against NC redistricting plans”
Voting rights groups in North Carolina filed a sweeping redistricting lawsuit Tuesday that claims the Republican-led legislature violated federal law by racially gerrymandering the state House, state Senate and congressional plans for election districts.
The suit by the state NAACP, Common Cause and eight Black voters says that the election districts violate the federal Voting Rights Act and the U.S. constitutional amendments that prohibit racial discrimination.
“Voting-rights groups sue over new Ohio elections law”
COLUMBUS, Ohio — In a new federal lawsuit, voting-rights groups say that a recently passed Ohio law which makes it a felony for someone other than a postal worker or a close relative to handle someone’s absentee ballot illegally discriminates against disabled people.
“Georgia redistricting tests if the Voting Rights Act protects ‘coalition districts’”
NPR:
NORCROSS, Ga. — Anthony Pacheco is Latino, but for the last several years he has worked as a community organizer at the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta.
More than once, people have asked him why.
“I see a lot of parallels between Latinx communities and Asian American communities here in Gwinnett County,” Pacheco says, in a conference room just off the main hall of the public library, where the shelves are lined with books in Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean and Mandarin.
Pacheco says Gwinnett County is a place where many cultures mesh. “Where I get my haircut, it’s a Vietnamese place,” he says.
This week, about 20 miles southwest at the federal courthouse in Atlanta, a judge is considering whether the federal Voting Rights Act protects communities like this one — so-called “coalition districts” where together, Black, Latino and Asian American voters form a majority.
“A lawsuit by Latinos in Kansas claims their city’s election method is unfair”
WaPo:
DODGE CITY, Kan. — For the past 13 years, Hector Almendarez has picked up his hard hat every workday and driven down Wyatt Earp Avenue — passing the Cowboy Capital Saloon & Grill and the Boot Hill Museum, where visitors drink sarsaparilla from the Long Branch Saloon – to work his shift at a nearby meatpacking plant.
He is one of thousands of Hispanic immigrants who have come to this city of 27,000 in Southwest Kansas over the past four decades to work in one of its plants. Known for its cowboy culture and as a symbol of the Western frontier, Dodge City, a quintessential emblem of an older, Whiter America, is now 65 percent Latino, according to U.S. Census data.
But despite its changing demographics, Dodge City’s city commission – the local body in charge of enacting policies that affect its residents most directly, including housing, transportation, and education – remains nearly all White. Almendarez, who makes rounds at his plant registering fellow Latino citizens to vote, believes the commission’s membership might better represent the city’s diversity if its five members were elected from local neighborhoods. Instead, every commissioner is elected city-wide rather than by just one district. Two Latino residents are suing over the practice.
“How Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network Orchestrated a New Attack on the Voting Rights Act”
Ari Berman in Mother Jones:
On November 20, a three-judge panel on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private plaintiffs could not bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the key remaining provision of the landmark civil rights law, which prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate against voters of color. “The statute is silent on the existence of a private right of action,” wrote Judge David Stras of Minnesota, who was appointed by Donald Trump. Stras’ opinion represented the latest salvo against voting rights by the dark-money network linked to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo. . . . As Judge Lavenski Smith, an appointee of George W. Bush who is the only Black judge on the 8th Circuit, noted in his dissent, of the 182 successful Section 2 cases over the past 40 years, only 15 were brought solely by the attorney general. If voting rights litigation were dependent on the Justice Department, it would slow to a trickle—or, under a hostile administration, to a halt.