Supreme Court now tosses out Louisiana lawsuit:
Supreme Court says Louisiana ballot maps must be redrawn to add ANOTHER district where majority of residents are black: State accused of violating election laws by diluting African-American votes
- The ruling was made without dissent
- It follows a similar decision against the state of Alabama
- Lower courts had raised concerns that Black voting rights had been illegally diluted
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a Republican-led bid to overturn a ruling that said black voting rights in Louisiana had been diluted after officials redrawn the election map.
In a brief order published Monday (June 26), judges declined to rule on the case and sent it back to a lower court.
The move came after a senior Republican official sought the support of the U.S. Supreme Court after black voters accused the Pelican State of discrimination.
Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin wanted to quash a federal judge’s decision that the map delineating Louisiana’s six U.S. House of Representatives districts was created on racial grounds.
One-third of Louisiana’s residents are black.
Justices took it a step further two weeks ago in a similar case involving Alabama, directly ordering the state 5-4 to review its electoral boundaries.
The court then ruled that race had played a role in the changes to the voting card, in violation of the federal voting rights law.
In that ruling, judges chose not to further reverse the protections in the Voting Rights Act, as had been done in two major decisions in the past decade.
The Louisiana case will now go to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ahead of next year’s election to elect a new House of Representatives.
Prosecutors said the Republican-drawn illegally packed large numbers of black voters into one single district and scattered the rest into the five others in numbers too small to allow them to pick their preferred candidates.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, had vetoed the congressional map approved by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.
But state lawmakers went ahead with a motion to override that veto.
Governor John Bel Edwards had tried unsuccessfully to block the revision of the electoral map
One of the lawsuits alleged that the plan “continues the long history of the state of Louisiana of maximizing political power for white citizens by disenfranchising and discriminating against black Louisianans.”
Prosecutors said in court documents that “highly racially polarized voting almost universally leads to the electoral defeat of black-preferred candidates” in Louisiana.
Constituencies in the United States are redrawn every decade to reflect population changes as measured by a national census, most recently conducted in 2020.
In most states, such redistribution is done by the party in power, which can lead to map manipulation for partisan gain.
Democrats have accused Republicans of exploiting the majorities of state legislatures to draw electoral cards that dilute the influence of black and other minority voters.
Republicans have said that consideration of race in electoral maps should be limited.