COLUMBIA, SC — A group that advocates for protecting and expanding voting rights is asking the South Carolina Supreme Court to order lawmakers to redraw the state’s voting districts because they are too skewed toward Republicans.
South Carolina’s congressional map was approved two months ago by a 6-3 vote U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the state General Assembly did not use race to divide districts based on the 2020 Census.
The new maps helped Republicans extend their 6-1 lead in the House of Representatives after Democrats surprisingly gained a seat two years earlier.
The League of Women Voters’ lawsuit uses testimony and evidence from that case to argue that the American constituencies violate the South Carolina Constitution, which provides that elections shall be free and open and that all people shall be equally protected under the law.
Manipulating constituencies so that one party has far more political power than it should based on voting records is cheating, said Allen Chaney, legal director of the South Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is handling the lawsuit.
“The voters of South Carolina deserve to vote with their neighbors and have their voices count equally. This case is about restoring representative democracy to South Carolina, and I hope the South Carolina Supreme Court will do the same,” Chaney said in a statement announcing the lawsuit Monday.
The lawsuit was filed against the leadership of both the Republican-dominated Senate and House of Representatives, which approved the new maps in January 2022.
“This new lawsuit is yet another attempt by special interests to achieve through the courts what they cannot achieve at the ballot box: ignore representative government. I firmly believe these claims will be as unfounded as other challenges along these lines,” House Speaker Murrell Smith, Republican, said in a statement.
The suit said South Carolina lawmakers split counties, cities and communities to ensure Republican voters in the 1st District from Charleston to Beaufort, which was flipped by a Democrat in 2018 before Republican Nancy Mace flipped it again in 2020.
Democratic voters were then moved to the 6th District, which had a majority of minority voters. The district includes both downtown Charleston and Columbia, which are more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) apart and have little in common.
The ACLU’s lawsuit argues that in a state where former Republican President Donald Trump won 55% of the vote in 2020, none of the state’s seven electoral districts are truly competitive, with Democrats disproportionately concentrated in the 6th District.
Five districts faced off in the new maps in 2022. Republicans won four seats with 56% to 65% of the vote. Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn won his district with 62%.
“There are no competitive districts in the current congressional map (i.e., districts where Democrats hold between 45 and 55 percent of the seats). This is despite the fact that … simulations show that following traditional redistricting principles would have resulted in mapmakers drawing a map with two competitive congressional districts,” the ACLU wrote in its lawsuit.
The civil rights group is asking the state Supreme Court to hear the case itself rather than allowing hearings and trials to take place in a lower court.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has similar language in the state constitutions of Kentucky, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Courts there have also ruled that dividing electoral districts to secure power for one political party violates the right to equal protection and free and fair elections, the ACLU said in a statement.