By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a bid by South Carolina officials to revive a Republican-crafted voting map that a lower court said had unconstitutionally “exiled” 30,000 Black voters from a closely contested congressional district.
The justices took up an appeal by South Carolina officials of a federal judicial panel’s ruling that found the Republican-drawn map had deliberately split up Black neighborhoods in Charleston County in a “stark racial gerrymander” and ordered the U.S. House of Representatives district to be redrawn.
Gerrymandering is a practice involving the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to marginalize a certain set of voters and increase the influence of others. In this case, the Republican legislators were accused of racial gerrymandering to reduce the influence of black voters.
Legislative districts across the country are redrawn to reflect population changes documented in the nationwide census conducted by the federal government every decade. South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature adopted a new voting map last year following the 2020 U.S. census.
The map set new boundaries for the state’s 1st congressional district, which for almost four decades had consistently elected a Republican to the House until 2018, when a Democrat was elected in what was widely seen as an upset victory. In 2020, Republican Nancy Mace won the district by just over 1 percentage point.
In redrawing the district last year, Republicans moved more than 30,000 Black residents in Charleston County to the neighboring majority-Black 6th congressional district, which for more than 30 years has been represented by Representative James Clyburn, a Black Democratic legislator.
The Republican map resulted in a 1st congressional district with a larger percentage of white, Republican-leaning voters. Mace, who is white, coasted to re-election last November under the district’s new configuration, winning by 14 percentage points.
The state conference of the NAACP civil right group in 2022 brought a legal challenge against several House districts created under the map, saying they were designed at least in part with “a racially discriminatory intent to discriminate against Black voters in violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
A federal three-judge panel in January ruled in favor of the challengers on their claims related to the 1st congressional district, finding that the way it was drawn by Republicans violated the rights of Black voters under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments, which guarantee equal protection under the law and prohibit race-based voting discrimination.
The panel wrote that the strategies employed in drawing the district boundaries “ultimately exiled over 30,000 African American citizens from their previous district and created a stark racial gerrymander of Charleston County and the City of Charleston.”
The judges – all three appointed by Democratic presidents – ruled that no elections can take place in the 1st district until it has been redrawn, prompting the South Carolina Republican officials to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Redistricting in most U.S. states is carried out by the party in power, though some states assign the task to independent commissions to ensure fairness. Gerrymandering typically involves packing voters who tend to favor a particular party into a small number of districts to diminish their statewide voting power while dispersing others in districts in numbers too small to be a majority.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
