On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a significant ruling on a case concerning a congressional map in South Carolina which had faced criticism as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The verdict determined that the South Carolina district in question could continue using the map in future electoral procedures, overturning a previous ruling by a federal district court. The decision essentially secures a safe seat for the Republican Party in a district renowned for ideological division fueled by racial and party voting correlations.
The focal point of this ruling arose around the question of how courts should distinguish between roles played by race and party affiliation during redistricting processes. In the highly politically charged environment of South Carolina, where exit polls from the 2020 elections indicated that almost 90% of Black voters were supportive of Democrat Joe Biden, such distinctions take on critical significance.
In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito dismissed the concept that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature had unduly rested on race in shaping the disputed district. He further proposed that connecting evidence of racial effects in a political gerrymander to allegations of bad faith, in locations where race and partisan preference overlap significantly, has potentially far-reaching implications. It could, in his estimation, permit litigants and courts to circumvent the Supreme Court’s preceding verdict in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that federal courts should not consider claims of partisan gerrymandering.
Dissenting voices on the court were led by Justice Elena Kagan, who alongside Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, interpreted this decision as one granting the green light to legislators seeking to leverage race either for the attainment of partisan objectives or in an attempt to diminish the electoral influence of minority voters. Kagan further expressed the sentiment that legislators and mapmakers were now free to avoid scrutiny by attributing their decisions to factors other than race.
By way of background, this case surfaced back in 2021 when local Republicans in the state legislature drew the district at the center of the dispute, known as District 1. The South Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Taiwan Scott, an African-American resident of the district, challenged this district in federal court as the product of racial gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on this case has far-reaching implications for future racial gerrymandering cases. If other courts follow the standard set in this case, plaintiffs will have a higher burden to prove that maps were drawn with the primary intent of racial segregation.