(CN) — In the latest victory for Black voters in Louisiana, a federal judge ruled Thursday the state’s 2022 legislative redistricting plans violate the Voting Rights Act.
The ruling comes just two weeks after the state enacted a new congressional district map, following a separate legal finding that it likely violated the Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by cracking and packing districts by race.
The lawsuit targeting the legislative maps was filed against state officials in March 2022 by four individual Black voters, along with the Louisiana NAACP and nonprofit group Black Votes Matter. It was the subject of a seven-day bench trial concluding on Dec. 5, 2023.
The contested maps — approved by a Republican-controlled Legislature using population numbers from the 2020 Census —designated 28 out of 105 House districts as majority Black, while 11 of 39 Senate seats were similarly situated.
But relying on the testimony of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, Chief U.S. District Judge Shelley Dick, a President Barack Obama appointee, agreed the state’s Black population had increased significantly since 2000 while the white population had decreased, particularly in the New Orleans region.
Dick determined Black voters are “unnecessarily concentrated” in at least two Senate districts containing a Black voting age population “well over” 50%. Dick also found the Black voting age population of five other senate districts is “unjustifiably fragmented.”
Dick noted there are similar examples of packed and cracked districts in the state’s House map, including two districts where Black voters comprise 65% or more of the population.
“There is certainly an opportunity to disperse the Black population into at least one additional district in this region,” Dick wrote, adding the numbers were sufficient to create new Black districts in Caddo Parrish, the Baton Rouge metropolitan area and in or around Lake Charles.
Dick added that the plaintiffs satisfied all three elements of the so-called Gingles test: that non-minority districts contain a minority group large and compact enough to constitute a majority in a single-member district; that the minority groups are politically cohesive; and that the minority group’s preferred candidate is often or always defeated.
Testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, elections expert Lisa Handley presented evidence that across 16 previous statewide elections, “white voters consistently bloc voted to defeat the candidates supported by Black voters.”
“Racially polarized voting substantially impedes the ability of Black voters to elect candidates of their choice to the Louisiana state legislature in these areas unless districts are drawn to provide Black voters with this opportunity,” Handley testified, adding only 12% to 15% of white voters typically support the Black-preferred candidate in statewide elections. In defense of those trends, state officials claimed voters were motivated by politics, not race.
But Dick emphasized the courts have repeatedly recognized that Louisiana has a long and ongoing problem with racial discrimination, one that didn’t end with the Voting Rights Act.
“The U.S. Attorney General issued 66 objection letters to more than 200 voting changes in Louisiana from 1965 to 1999,” she wrote, adding there were another 13 more recent examples of local governments thumbing their nose at suggested changes by either making the minimal effort to achieve racial parity or ignoring it altogether.
To this day, Dick added, “Black voter suppression continues in the form of closing polling places, restricting access to polling places, restricting access to early voting and limiting mail-in voting.”
Dick concluded, “the court holds that the preponderance of the evidence establishes that the enacted state house and senate maps crack or pack large and geographically compact minority populations such that Black voters in the challenged districts ‘have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.’”
Dick advised the state to address the findings of the court and implement compliant maps within a “reasonable period of time.” Louisiana’s next legislative elections are scheduled in 2027.
Meanwhile, the state’s new Section 2 compliant congressional map is also being challenged in a Jan. 31 complaint arguing it was racially gerrymandered to create two majority-Black districts.
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