Minority groups are not able to join together to claim their votes are diluted in challenges to redistricting, according to an Aug. 1 ruling from a federal appeals court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in 1988 that minority groups could join together to challenge redistricting under the Voting Rights Act, which bars denial or abridgment of voting rights based on race. In the new ruling, the same court reversed that decision.
She said that grouping minorities together is inconsistent with the act and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
Supreme Court justices have said that a minority group bringing a redistricting challenge must prove it is large enough on its own to be a majority in a reasonably configured district.
The case involves redistricting in Galveston County, Texas, where commissioners, following the 2020 Census, formed a new map that no longer included a district with a majority of black and Hispanic voters. Fifty-eight percent of voting-age residents in a district that was in effect from 1991 to 2021 were either black or Hispanic.
The change triggered lawsuits from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, former Galveston County Constable Terry Petteway, and other groups and individuals.
Under the Fifth Circuit’s Campos v. City of Baytown, Galveston County officials erasing the combined majority-minority district violates the Voting Rights Act, the suits said.
The adopted map “violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act ... because under the totality of the circumstances, the Commissioners Court plan has the effect of denying Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice by diluting their voting strength,” one of the suits stated. The county’s black and Latino population is “sufficiently large and geographically compact to allow for the creation of a single member Commissioners Court precinct in which minority voters would constitute a majority of the population and citizen voting age population.”
But the new decision struck down the Campos precedent, making it more difficult for minorities to challenge redistricting.
“Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim,” Jones wrote. “On the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a vote dilution claim as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the plural.”
A dozen judges formed the majority in the ruling, while half a dozen dissented.
“Today, we conclude that our longstanding precedent construes Section 2 too broadly. But whether our precedent unduly narrowed or broadened the reach of a federal statute, our duty is the same,” he wrote. “We reconcile our circuit precedent with the governing law, regardless of whose ox is gored.”
U.S. Circuit Judge Dana Douglas also decried the new ruling.
The decision not only reversed the 1988 ruling but also overturned two rulings in the Galveston case: one from a district court and another from a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit.
The ruling came after the en banc court, or full court, opted to reconsider the case.
