The NAACP and a voter sued, claiming the boundaries amounted to racial gerrymandering. While a lower court agreed, the Supreme Court did not. The 6-3 conservative majority ruled, in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, No. 22-807, that South Carolina engaged in partisan, not racial, gerrymandering. (The court previously ruled that federal courts have no jurisdiction over partisan gerrymandering.)
The ruling raises the bar by a lot for anyone who attempts to make a case that lawmakers used race as a yardstick in map drawing. It would seem to be easier to shift voters of color — Black voters in South Carolina, Latinos in Texas, Asians in Flushing, NY — to diminish their influence and weaken their vote.
On the one hand, the court gave Republicans good news for this election cycle because they need every last win to hold the House (The House remains a toss-up, with the GOP currently favored to retake the Senate and White House). On the other hand, it’s now far harder for Republicans in Democratic states to sue over maps.
The court ruling means that voters remain caught in a partisan game controlled by the party in power. It reinforced the absurdity of a system that allows politicians to draw maps to their benefit to make their election easier.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Some 13 states use commissions to draw legislative maps for Congressional districts, and 18 use similar commissions for state legislative maps.
Ohio hopes to be next.
The group Citizens Not Politicians continues to press for a ballot initiative that would create a commission to draw Congressional maps, an initiative that’s taken on more urgency given the Supreme Court ruling.
The citizens’ group has been active, with rallies across the state, including in Lima, Fostoria and Mansfield. It needs to gather 413,487 valid signatures to get the measure on the November ballot.
Ohio voters have twice demanded fair redistricting at the ballot box, only to have politicians ignore them. Lawmakers realize the effort threatens their hold on power and are already trying to discredit the citizen group’s efforts, calling it nothing more than an avenue for special interests to insert themselves in Ohio politics.
Voters are smarter than that. What do you think has been going on for decades all across the country? Politicians draw maps that benefit them and that helps the special interests who support them.
Besides, that argument hasn’t worked in the other states that have enacted commissions, so there’s little reason to believe it will work here.
There is no clean or perfect system with anything, let alone something as complicated as redistricting.
But we need fairness. When any politician draws rigged maps, it disenfranchises voters based on partisan leanings.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling shows how important it is that Citizens Not Politicians gather signatures and get their initiative on the ballot so voters can, for a third time, end partisan gerrymandering.
The first two times should have been enough. It wasn’t, and that tells you all you need to know about who and what lawmakers care about.
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday.
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