What the latest Voting Rights Act ruling could mean for NC redistricting lawsuits | Opinion
A federal appeals court panel significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act last week by taking away the key mechanism used to enforce it. The court ruled that private citizens and civil rights groups cannot bring lawsuits under Section 2, the provision of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices. Only the federal government has the ability to bring such lawsuits, the ruling said.
One of those lawsuits was filed in North Carolina last week. Eastern North Carolina voters Monday against the state’s new voting districts, arguing that the state Senate map violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents. It’s the first — but likely not the last — legal challenge to the new legislative and congressional maps enacted by Republican lawmakers last month.
The ruling came from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, so it won’t immediately affect North Carolina, which is located in the 4th Circuit. The case is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, though, and if the ruling stands, it would become significantly harder to challenge legislation that threatens voting rights in every state.
The ruling originates from a redistricting case in Arkansas that’s quite similar to the one filed in North Carolina this week. The Arkansas chapter of the NAACP and others sued over the state’s legislative maps, which they also argued dilute the voting power of Black people. The North Carolina case alleges that the state Senate map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it “cracks” Black voters into multiple districts, thus diluting their votes. One of those districts stretches more than 160 miles from the Virginia border to Carteret County, the lawsuit notes.
It’s not exactly clear how the U.S. Supreme Court would rule if it ultimately takes up the case. The court has taken steps to weaken the Voting Rights Act over the years, but it has also upheld it, most notably in a June ruling striking down a racially gerrymandered map in Alabama. But the Arkansas case is different, because it wouldn’t ask the court to decide whether a map was gerrymandered — it would ask the court to decide whether private citizens even have the right to bring such a lawsuit in the first place.
In a 2021 ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in a concurring opinion that the court has assumed, but has not explicitly decided, that private citizens have that right. Since that question had not come before the court, he wrote, there was no need for the court to address it. Gorsuch’s opinion worried legal experts, who feared it could put that part of the Voting Rights Act in danger. The 8th Circuit even cited Gorsuch’s opinion in its ruling, noting that he called it an “open question.”
If the 8th Circuit’s ruling is upheld, it would strip voters of the ability to fight back against disenfranchisement. In states like North Carolina, where lawmakers regularly pass legislation that infringes upon the right to vote, it’s often up to private citizens and interest groups to challenge it in court. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the basis for many voting rights lawsuits in North Carolina, including the 2013 “monster voting law” and multiple racial gerrymandering cases.
While the federal government would still be able to bring lawsuits, it doesn’t have unlimited resources, so it’s unlikely that it would be able to pursue litigation against every voting rights violation in every state. Over the past several decades, only a small percentage of successful Section 2 lawsuits nationwide were brought exclusively by the Justice Department.
North Carolinians are already limited in their ability to hold lawmakers accountable for brazen gerrymandering. Given the current state of the judiciary, racial gerrymandering lawsuits are the only true recourse that voters have to fight such discrimination. The Republican majority on North Carolina’s highest court has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not forbidden by the state constitution, effectively giving legislators the ability to draw maps with impunity. If the 8th Circuit’s ruling is upheld, that last path of recourse could be taken away, too.
