The US Supreme Court has made it increasingly challenging for Black and minority voters to argue that legislators have an unfair racial bias when drawing new voting maps, according to civil rights advocates. The 6-3 ruling has specifically stated that South Carolina voters have not conclusively proven that racial prejudice, rather than political partisanship, motivated the state’s Republican legislators in drawing district lines.
The impact of this decision creates additional hurdles for those who wish to challenge racial gerrymandering, creating consequences that are likely to reverberate far beyond the borders of South Carolina. According to Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson, writing for Bloomberg Law, the ruling suggests that legislators should be given a presumption of good faith, making it harder for minority voters to establish that their votes have been ‘diluted’.
“I do not want to say that these claims cannot be established under different facts and under different circumstances,” Leah Aden, Senior Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued the case said. Full article here.