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Justices Poised to Restore Voting Map Ruled a Racial Gerrymander [1]

['Adam Liptak', 'More About Adam Liptak']

Date: 2023-10-11  

Several members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed prepared on Wednesday to reinstate a South Carolina voting map that a lower court had ruled was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for instance, seemed unpersuaded by the lower court’s findings and reasoning. He said the evidence that Republican state lawmakers had used race as the predominant factor was circumstantial and consistent with something that is legally acceptable: trying to achieve the partisan goal of creating a district with a distinct conservative tilt.

“Disentangling race and politics in a situation like this is very, very difficult,” he said. A ruling for the challengers, he added, “would be breaking new ground in our voting rights jurisprudence.”

The case concerned a constitutional puzzle: how to distinguish the roles of race and partisanship in drawing voting maps when Black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats. The difference matters because the Supreme Court has said that only racial gerrymandering may be challenged in federal court under the Constitution.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/us/politics/supreme-court-south-carolina-voting-map.html

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