The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday that a lower court “clearly erred” when it held that South Carolina racially gerrymandered its congressional district map.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday that a lower court “clearly erred” when it held that South Carolina racially gerrymandered its congressional district map.
The majority held that the “circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race, not partisan preferences, drove the districting process” behind the creation of the map.
“First, a party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”
“In this case, which features a challenge to South Carolina’s redistricting efforts in the wake of the 2020 census, the three-judge District Court paid only lip service to these propositions,” Alito continued, writing that the court’s findings of fact were “clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.
