The Florida supreme court rejected a challenge to the state’s congressional map on Thursday, a decision that weakens the influence of Black voters in the state and could make it easier to draw gerrymandered maps in the future.
The years-long legal dispute centered on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to get rid of a winding district in northern Florida where Black voters made up nearly half of the eligible voter population and had repeatedly elected Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, to Congress. When the Florida legislature redrew the map in 2021, DeSantis went out of his way to chop up the district into four different ones in which white people comprised a majority. DeSantis said at the time that the district, which stretched more than 200 miles from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, had impermissibly sorted voters based on their race.
