black voter

ATLANTA — Georgia’s Republican legislative leaders on Wednesday rejected Gov. Brian Kemp’s call to redraw congressional and legislative districts during a special session, citing concerns about moving too quickly after a U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters.

House Speaker Jon Burns sent Kemp a letter hours before a special session was set to begin Wednesday, and he announced the decision as demonstrators filled the Georgia Capitol with chants of “Black voters matter!”

The decision marked a setback for both Kemp and President Trump, who has urged Republican-led states to redraw congressional districts to their advantage. Ten states already have enacted new congressional districts ahead of the November midterm elections. Georgia would have been the first to change districts for the 2028 elections.

Burns said lawmakers want to take their time after the court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander and laid the groundwork for other Southern states to redraw their congressional districts. Burns said it was more important for lawmakers to focus on economic matters rather than “partisan games.” He also cited pending litigation over existing Georgia districts and the need for the state to understand the full ramifications for how race can or cannot be used in redistricting.

Republican legislative leaders did not rule out revisiting redistricting later this year.

Minority voting rights are especially salient in Georgia, where the Capitol complex includes a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and sits blocks from where the slain civil rights icon lived, preached and led the movement that yielded the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Conservative justices gave the green light

Before Callais, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was understood to require maps — for Congress, state legislatures and local legislative bodies — that gave historically marginalized minorities a reasonable chance to select candidates of their choice. Nationally and in Georgia, those so-called “opportunity districts” have disproportionately elected Black and other nonwhite representatives.

For example, about a third of Georgia’s 180 state representatives are Black. Latino, Asian and other minorities bring the total nonwhite share to about 40% — roughly reflecting the state’s overall population. Georgia’s U.S. House delegation has five districts out of 14 total where the electorate is majority or plurality nonwhite. All elected Black Democrats in 2024.

With the Callais ruling, issued in April, a conservative majority of justices concluded that jurisdictions drawn with racial makeup in mind are discriminatory and violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. The justices declared that apportionment should be “race neutral.”

Their stated reasoning did not hinge on party interests, and federal courts have said partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. But in Southern states, especially, party loyalty dovetails considerably with race and ethnicity. So the decision has allowed Republicans — a party dominated by white people — to redraw maps to goose likely GOP districts by redistributing nonwhite voters who tend to support Democrats.

That, many civil rights activists and experts argue, makes it impossible for Southern legislatures to be genuinely “race neutral” when drawing boundaries.

Emory University professor Carol Anderson compared Callais and the resulting redistricting push to poll taxes and literacy tests imposed by white Southern conservatives — and blessed by the Supreme Court — during the Jim Crow era.

“They used racially neutral language for policies that were clearly racially targeted,” said Anderson, who is also a board member of Fair Fight Action, a group organizing against the Georgia redistricting.

There were risks for Kemp and Republicans

It’s not guaranteed that Georgia Republicans can get what they want from new maps.

Partisan gerrymandering involves redistributing voters — packing certain citizens into fewer districts or dividing them across more districts. Around metro Atlanta, spreading nonwhite, Democratic-leaning voters across more districts could make more seats seem to lean Republican. The risk, however, is that more battleground districts emerge because white metropolitan voters are trending less conservative, which could give Democratic candidates of any race or ethnicity more chances to win.

That’s perhaps not a major factor in the Georgia state Senate, which already is considered gerrymandered for Republicans. But it could be a consideration when drawing state House and U.S. House maps.

Kemp was effectively asking Republicans, especially in metro Atlanta, to redraw their own boundaries and take on new, unfamiliar territory.

Trump started the fight before the Supreme Court decision

Nationally, a partisan redistricting battle started last year when Trump urged Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional boundaries to shore up the GOP’s narrow House majority in Washington this November. Texas answered the call first.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento answered with their own gerrymander that voters later approved. A succession of states followed. The outcome would have been close to even had the Virginia Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives, not struck down new Democratic-drawn maps approved by the state’s voters. All told, Republicans think they could gain as many as 16 seats from their redistricting efforts while Democrats think they could gain six seats from new districts in California and Utah.

That still may not be enough for the GOP to hold a congressional majority, given Trump’s lagging approval ratings. But it could mitigate Democratic gains and set Republicans up well for 2028 and beyond.

Barrow writes for The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Alabama on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to use a congressional map favoring Republicans in this year’s elections, despite a lower court’s ruling that the redistricting plan intentionally discriminates against Black people.

The state’s Republican leadership filed an emergency appeal with the justices a day after a three-judge court refused to let the state use a map it adopted three years ago that has a majority Black population in just one of its seven congressional districts.

The judges instead required Alabama to continue using a court-ordered map that was put in place for the 2024 elections that includes two districts where Black residents comprise a majority or close to it.

Atty. Gen. Steve Marshall told the court that the state did not intentionally discriminate against Black residents and should be allowed to hold elections this year under a map chosen by lawmakers, not judges.

The appeal is the latest development in the fallout from last month’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Black-majority district in Louisiana and weakened the federal Voting Rights Act. That ruling has led Republicans in several Southern states, including Alabama, to take steps to reshape voting districts with large minority populations that have elected Democrats.

The redistricting frenzy is part of a broader push by President Trump to try to hold on to Republicans’ slim House majority in the November elections.

The Alabama cases stretches back several years. The three-judge panel in 2023 ruled that a map drawn by Republican state lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of Black citizens. The court said the state, which is about 27% Black, should have two districts where Black voters are the majority or close to it. The court-selected map was used in 2024.

After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Louisiana case, Alabama officials moved to implement the 2023 state-drawn map. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed to lift the injunction that had blocked the map’s use and sent the case back to the three-judge panel for reconsideration in light of the Louisiana ruling.

In the meantime, voters cast ballots in Alabama’s May 19 primaries, and Republican Gov. Kay Ivey set new special primaries for Aug. 11 in four congressional districts affected by the map switch.

Upon further review, the judicial panel said it was standing behind its initial finding that there was “undisputed evidence” of intentional racial discrimination, a holding that was independent of and unaffected by the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

It said the special congressional primaries should instead proceed under the previous court-approved districts.

The use of the court-ordered map led to the 2024 election of U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat. State Republicans are seeking to use a map that would give the GOP an opportunity to reclaim the south Alabama seat.

The state is asking for Supreme Court action by Monday as it makes preparations for the special vote in August.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.