The Supreme Court’s recent decision on South Carolina’s congressional map will make it more difficult for voters to prove state lawmakers improperly relied on race in drawing new congressional lines, advocates and legal experts say.
The opinion laid out a new standard that requires challengers to show that state legislators made their redistricting decisions primarily on the race of voters, not on which party those voters had supported in the past.
It can already be tough for challengers to distinguish between those motivations when racial identification and political affiliation are highly correlated. In the South Carolina case, the civil rights groups who led the challenge said the correlation is particularly true for the state’s Black voters, who tend to support Democratic candidates by large margins.
