A state judge ruled on Saturday that a Florida redistricting plan supported by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is unconstitutional and cannot be used for any future elections for the US Congress because it makes it harder for Black voters in north Florida to select the representative they prefer.
Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh ordered that a new congressional map be created in accordance with the Florida Constitution before returning the proposal to the Florida Legislature.
The voting rights organizations who filed a legal challenge against the plan “have shown that the authorized plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect the candidate of preference in violation of the Florida Constitution,” Marsh ruled.
The ruling was the most recent to invalidate newly drawn congressional district lines in Southern states due to worries that they would reduce Black voters’ sway.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Republican-drawn electoral map in Alabama, joining liberal justices in rejecting the attempt to alter a historic voting rights law. The chance that the Republican-dominated state of Louisiana may need to redraw boundary lines in order to create a second congressional district with a majority of Black constituents increased shortly after the Supreme Court released its hold on a political remap lawsuit from that state.
Republicans have either appealed the verdicts in each case or have promised to do so since they may favor Democratic congressional candidates running in 2024 under newly drawn district lines. The Florida Supreme Court will probably hear the Florida case in the end.
Following a census every ten years, legislators in all 50 states, including Florida, redistrict political boundaries.
DeSantis, a contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, came under fire for effectively forcing Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, a Black man, out of office by dividing his district and displacing a sizable Black voter population into Republican-leaning white districts.
DeSantis made an unusual intervention in the redistricting process last year when he vetoed a blueprint that would have kept Lawson’s district intact in the Republican-controlled Legislature. He convened an emergency meeting, presented his own map, and demanded that lawmakers approve it.
The altered congressional map allegedly violated state and federal laws that safeguard Black voters’ ability to vote, according to the voting rights organizations who filed the complaint.
Among Florida’s 22.2 million residents, Black people make up 17%. According to the new maps, there are only white members of Congress serving in a 360-mile region that stretches from the border of Alabama to the Atlantic Ocean and south from the border of Georgia to Orlando in central Florida.
Republican lawmakers’ defense claims that a state statute prohibiting the weakening or eradication of districts with a majority of minorities in them violated the U.S. Constitution were rejected by a Florida judge.
According to Marsh, the defendants in this case have not met their burden.