South Carolina can use a congressional map that critics claimed is racially discriminatory, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, overturning a district court that struck the map down—though the ruling won’t have any immediate impact on the November election after justices waited for months to rule on the case.
The Supreme Court upheld South Carolina's congressional map, despite allegations it constituted ... [+]
The court ruled 6-3 in favor of the South Carolina government in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, which challenged the state’s redrawn congressional map, arguing that it constitutes racial gerrymandering and dilutes Black residents’ votes.
A district court struck down the map in January 2023 and ordered the state to redraw its congressional District 1—currently represented by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace—finding it was unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
The Supreme Court reversed that ruling Thursday, with Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the court’s majority, arguing the district court’s decision was “clearly erroneous” and the evidence it relied on was “seriously misguided.”
In order to show a district has been improperly racially gerrymandered, challengers must demonstrate the state drew a district purposefully “‘to minimize or cancel out the voting potential of racial or ethnic minorities’,” Alito wrote, while in this case he claims they only showed that “race played a predominant role in the districting process.”
The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the ruling, with Justice Elena Kagan writing, “the Challengers introduced more than enough evidence of racial gerrymandering to support the District Court’s judgment” and the court’s majority “fails at every turn” to properly explain its decision to uphold the map.
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The original map with the allegedly gerrymandered district was set to be used in the November election even before the Supreme Court’s ruling. The high court took so long to decide the case that the lower district court, which initially struck down the map, ruled in March it should be used for the November election given the still-unresolved court dispute.
Kagan warned in her dissent that the court’s ruling could make it harder for future racial gerrymandering lawsuits to prevail, noting that Alito and the court’s majority say that the defendants who draw up allegedly discriminatory maps should be given “the benefit of the doubt,” making it harder for challengers to prove their claims. Alito also ruled against the NAACP challengers in part because they failed to provide an alternative map that wouldn’t be gerrymandered, which means future plaintiffs challenging congressional map now have an added burden to provide alternative maps or else risk having their case struck down, Kagan wrote.
“The majority picks and chooses evidence to its liking; ignores or minimizes less convenient proof; disdains the panel’s judgments about witness credibility; and makes a series of mistakes about expert opinions,” Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The majority declares that it knows better than the District Court what happened in a South Carolina map-drawing room to produce District 1. But the proof is in the pudding: On page after page, the majority’s opinion betrays its distance from, and lack of familiarity with, the events and evidence central to this case.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.