Protections for minority voters are at the center of a Florida redistricting case

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — One of a series of recent legal cases related to race and redistricting comes to Florida’s high court Thursday.

Voting rights groups challenging the state’s congressional map are counting on the Florida Supreme Court to reinstate a district that gave Black voters in the northern part of the state the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice.

“We want to make sure that we are protecting Black congressional representation,” said Genesis Robinson, interim executive director for Equal Ground Education Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the case. “That’s why we’re challenging this unconstitutional map.”

Ahead of the 2022 elections, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis succeeded in his push to reconfigure the former 5th Congressional District — which stretched about 200 miles across North Florida and picked up voters in Tallahassee and Jacksonville. The GOP-led state legislature had sought to preserve the district, until DeSantis took an unprecedented step for a governor and intervened with a map of his own that eliminated it.

The old 5th district was last held by former Democratic Rep. Al Lawson, who’s African American. That district was carved into four districts, and much of the area, now the 2nd district, is held by Rep. Neal Dunn, a white Republican.

“There's a high concentration of Black folks who live in that region,” Robinson explained. “They have not had a chance to elect the candidate of their choice” since the new map took effect.

On Thursday, the state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments from attorneys representing plaintiffs and the state, and then the court will decide whether to uphold the map or order a new one that restores Black representation in the region.

The case comes before the state’s highest court after opponents found no remedy in federal courts.

In December, a three-judge panel for the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Florida upheld the map after finding that plaintiffs couldn’t prove the legislature acted with “discriminatory intent.” Plaintiffs have said they don’t plan to challenge the federal court’s decision on appeal.

The Florida Constitution is at the heart of the state case

In 2010, a majority of Florida voters added the Fair Districts Amendments to the state constitution, which prohibit racial gerrymandering and intentional partisan gerrymandering. In the state case, plaintiffs focus on the former, arguing that the map violates that provision because it diminishes a minority group’s ability to elect their preferred candidate.

“We want the state to just simply follow the law,” Robinson said.

In 2012, the state Supreme Court laid out its interpretation of the provision, explaining that the legislature cannot eliminate a district where a minority group has historically had the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice without replacing it with another district that performs for minority voters.

A few years later, the high court applied this interpretation when it approved the former 5th Congressional District, finding that it complied with the state constitution.

“The concern here is that the Florida Supreme Court undoes the precedent,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, a nonprofit organization that’s affiliated with the Democratic Party and is funding the lawsuit.

Since that precedent was set, the court’s makeup has changed and now consists of mostly DeSantis appointees. “It should not be the case that the personnel on the court determine the outcome of a case, rather than the precedents that they are applying,” Jenkins said.

She added they’re confident that they “have a strong case” because it’s “a textbook application of this law.”

A state Supreme Court decision would come after a long legal battle

But that’s not how a state appellate court recently saw it.

In December, the state’s First District Court of Appeal upheld the governor’s map, reversing a lower court’s ruling and deviating from the state Supreme Court’s earlier precedent.

The appeal court reinterpreted the state constitution’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering to mean that it only applies if certain federal redistricting criteria are also met. The appeal court’s majority wrote that “minority voters living hundreds of miles apart in totally different communities” aren’t protected by the provision because the former 5th District wasn’t “geographically compact.”

Attorneys for the state echoed the state appeal court’s opinion regarding “geographical compactness” in their briefs to the state Supreme Court.

They also argue that the former congressional map violates the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, which guarantees equal protection of the law to all residents, because it puts race above other redistricting criteria, such as “geographic compactness.”

Democrats and others see the appeal court’s ruling, with its deviation from past state precedent, as “wildly out of step with judicial norms,” as Jenkins put it.

“They went out of their way to weigh in on the case and create their own interpretation,” Jenkins said.

“Under Florida precedent from last decade, this is an open and shut case,” added Michael Li, a redistricting expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voting rights.

“If the Florida Supreme Court affirms [the appeal court’s view], it really would weaken a key protection for voters of color,” Li said

If plaintiffs are successful, a new map wouldn’t take effect until at least 2026 — three congressional election cycles after DeSantis’ map took effect. If not, they could try to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Voting rights groups, however, don’t want to wait much longer for a new map.

“It's important to have representation that looks like you,” said Robinson, of Equal Ground Education Fund. “We're hoping that the Florida Supreme Court will side with us and restore that representation for those voters.”