Dec. 27, 2024
Carson City, NV — Today, Attorney General Aaron Ford announced he has joined a coalition of 20 attorneys general to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to reaffirm that states, in exercising their primary responsibility for legislative redistricting, should be given the first opportunity to redraw legislative maps in response to likely violations of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
In an amicus brief filed in Louisiana v. Callais, the coalition, led by Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb and New York Attorney General Letitia James, is supporting the State of Louisiana and a group of Louisiana voters seeking to uphold a congressional map that includes two majority-Black districts.
"The latest decision in this case, if allowed to stand, would undermine years of settled precedent and directly sabotage the rights of minority voters by weakening the protections of the Voting Rights Act,” said AG Ford. “It is imperative that the Supreme Court rules for the State of Louisiana in this case and allows these long-standing protections to remain secure.”
In 2022, a federal court in the Middle District of Louisiana found that the state’s congressional map likely diluted the votes of Black residents and thus violated Section 2 of the VRA. In response, to comply with the VRA, the Louisiana legislature enacted a new map in 2024 that added a second majority-Black district.
Later, a different group of self-identified “non-African American voters” sued the state in the Western District of Louisiana, arguing that the 2024 remedial map with a second majority-Black district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Despite binding Supreme Court precedent allowing states to redistrict when there is a “good reason” to believe they must do so to comply with the VRA, the three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana barred the state from using the 2024 VRA-compliant map, trapping Louisiana between competing court orders and undermining the state’s ability to craft legislative districts that comply with federal voting rights law. The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Western District of Louisiana’s constitutional ruling was correct.
In their brief, the state attorneys general argue that in assigning elected state legislatures the primary role in redistricting, the Constitution gives them ample “breathing room” to enact legislative maps that remedy likely VRA violations. The brief explains that the finding by a federal court that Louisiana’s existing map likely violated the VRA provided the state with a good reason to believe that its addition of a second majority-Black district was required to comply with the federal voting rights statute and thus did not violate Constitution.
The brief also urges the Court to reject the arguments in an amicus brief filed by Alabama and 12 other states to toss out years of settled voting rights precedent interpreting Section 2 of the VRA. Not only would it be inappropriate to address Alabama’s arguments in this case, but accepting those arguments would undermine states’ decades-long reliance on the Supreme Court’s settled interpretation of Section 2.
In filing the brief, AG Ford joins the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
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