Kentucky Supreme Court upholds election maps

(CN) — The Kentucky Supreme Court issued a ruling on Thursday upholding congressional election maps that Democrats claim are unfairly gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.

In a sprawling 78-page ruling with multiple dissents, the commonwealth’s high court found that the congressional maps installed by the state's Republican supermajority were constitutional.

Justice Angela Bisig authored the opinion for the majority, which found that the mere existence of partisan influence is not enough to render the maps invalid.

“An expectation that apportionment will be free of partisan considerations would thus not only be unrealistic, but also inconsistent with our Constitution’s assignment of responsibility for that process to an elected political body,” Bisig wrote.

The majority went on to express that the court should only intervene when election maps contain blatant violations of constitutional rights.

“That is, we ask not whether the partisanship constitutes some slight or technical deviation from constitutional limitations, but rather whether it either involves a clear, flagrant, and unwarranted invasion of the constitutional rights of the people, or is so severe as to threaten our Commonwealth’s democratic form of government,” the opinion states.

The court also ruled that the challenged maps, which were used in the most recent election, did not violate restrictions on how the state’s counties could be divvied up into state districts.

Additionally, the court found that any present partisanship within the maps did not rise to the level of requiring court intervention.

“Let no one mistake our deference, however, as any hesitancy whatsoever to vigilantly guard the constitutional rights of the people and our democratic form of government should duty call,” Bisig wrote.

Kentucky’s Democrat Governor Andy Beshear originally vetoed the maps before being overruled by state Republicans, which led the governor’s party to challenge the maps in court.

In November 2022, Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Tomas Wingate found that the maps were gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, but that the state’s constitution did not offer relief.

While the new ruling upholds the maps, some of the justices disagreed with the majority’s findings, including Justice Shea Nickell who thinks that the matter should have been dismissed outright.

“Rather than presuming jurisdiction and claiming possession of an effective prescription, the better course would be to admit political gerrymandering — though a chronic disease infecting the health of our democracy — remains resistant to judicial cure for lack of Constitutional textual authority and any definitive framework of guiding rules and standards,” Nickell wrote.

Nickell expressed that due to the lack of any firm judicial fixes, any remedies to partisan gerrymandering must come from the voters.

“Thus, any comprehensive remedy for the deleterious effects of partisan gerrymandering must be addressed through the political process. Should the people discern egregious, arrogant political abuse upon review of the legislative redistricting plans enacted by their elected representatives in the General Assembly, their ultimate remedy lies in a constitutional amendment or expulsion of the perpetrators at the polls. In short, review and remedy of controversies related to political gerrymandering reside with the people,” he wrote.

Justice Michelle Keller disagreed with the majority’s findings that the maps properly complied with rules governing how individual counties can be split when drawing districts.

The rule, known as Section 33, governs how the state can be divided into the needed 38 districts for the state senate and the 100 districts for the state’s representatives. 

These requirements include an approximately equal distribution of population and prohibit the excessive dividing of a county into multiple districts. Keller argued that numerous counties were improperly split and contained multiple districts in violation of these rules.

“That reality is readily apparent in Kenton County, which was unnecessarily carved into 6 districts, and portions of which were joined with 4 other neighboring counties,” she wrote.

The majority’s opinion responded to this apparent deviation from the rules by saying that previous court precedent had found that fully adhering to Section 33 rules is impossible. 

“We hold that where full compliance with Section 33 is not possible, an apportionment plan does not violate Section 33 by combining more than two counties into a district, even when not strictly necessary, provided the plan does not include such combinations in a number or of such a nature as to clearly and flagrantly disregard the fundamental dual mandates of population equality and county integrity enshrined in Section 33,” Bisig wrote.

Beshear spoke about the ruling during a press conference held earlier in the day and said he had not had time to fully read the decision yet.

"I saw just one line that said, if people don't like the way the districts are redrawn they should vote the people out. Well wait, the districts are redrawn to make it harder to vote people out," he said. "The ruling is what it is, and we'll have to move forward, but we've got to get to a point where redistricting is about the people and not the politics."

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