Federal panel rules in favor of state in Arkansas congressional redistricting lawsuit

Yahoo

a day ago

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A three-judge federal court panel on Friday dismissed with prejudice a case challenging Arkansas' congressional district map.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas by a group of voters and the Christian Ministerial Alliance. It claimed boundaries for Arkansas' 2nd Congressional District were racially gerrymandered and diluted the votes of Black Arkansans.
Congressional and state legislative districts are redrawn after the U.S. Census each decade in a process known as redistricting. The goal is to create districts that contain roughly the same population.
The Ministerial Alliance's lawsuit was one of four filed to challenge Arkansas' 2021 redistricting process and the only one that hadn't been dismissed.
On Friday, U.S. Circuit Judge David Stras, U.S. District Judge D.P. Marshall Jr. and U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. granted the state's motion for summary judgment, saying there was not enough evidence to support the plaintiffs' racial discrimination claims.
'Multiple Arkansas citizens challenge how the General Assembly redrew the state's congressional district lines,' Friday's order states. 'Although their allegations were plausible enough to survive a motion to dismiss [Docs. 35, 42], the evidence does not back up their claims of racial discrimination. For that reason, we grant summary judgment to Secretary of State John Thurston.'
Thurston, who was secretary of state when the lawsuit was filed in 2023, was elected state treasurer in 2024 during a special election. The governor appointed Cole Jester to succeed Thurston.
Previously, the entirety of Pulaski County was included in Arkansas' Second Congressional District, which is represented by Republican U.S. Rep. French Hill. During the 2021 redistricting process, Pulaski County was split between three congressional districts.
Plaintiffs alleged the General Assembly considered racial data when redrawing district lines and unconstitutionally 'cracked' the Black voting bloc in southeast Pulaski County.
The state's attorneys submitted a motion for summary judgment in favor of the state last October.
According to Friday's order, the original complaint alleged two constitutional claims — one for racial gerrymandering under the Fourteenth Amendment and one for vote dilution under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The federal panel said race needed to be 'the predominant factor' motivating the General Assembly's decision and that awareness or acceptance of a 'racially disparate impact is not enough.'
Three-judge panel hears arguments but doesn't rule in Arkansas redistricting lawsuit
Creating 'an alternative map' is one way to prove redrawn boundaries were racially motivated, the panel said. However, that only works if the alternative map still accomplishes the Legislature's partisan goals.
'If it does not, then it just highlights how the pursuit of a nonracial aim — like retention, partisanship, or geography — could have led to an unintended racial disparity,' the panel wrote. 'All three of the plaintiffs' alternatives fall short in exactly this way.'
Citing a U.S. Supreme Court reversal of a decision by a three-judge panel that found South Carolina had discriminated against Black voters in a 2023 redistricting lawsuit, Stras and his counterparts noted the high court emphasized that the courts must 'start with the presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.'
'Absent direct evidence of racial discrimination and with only weak circumstantial evidence supporting the plaintiffs' case, the presumption of legislative good faith tips the balance,' Stras wrote.
That coupled with the fact that no alternative map achieves the General Assembly's goals with 'significantly greater racial balance,' meant the judges could not reasonably find that the plaintiffs had proved enough for their claim of racial gerrymandering to survive summary judgment, according to the ruling.
The primary obstacle of the presumption of good faith holds true for the plaintiffs' vote-dilution claim, according to Friday's order. While the vote-dilution claim requires race to be a 'motivating factor' instead of the predominant one, the panel argued 'the plaintiffs do not have enough evidence to get there.'
'Most of what the plaintiffs offer are the materials we have already discussed: maps, statistics, and legislative history, none of which are enough to infer a racial motivation,' the panel wrote.
The federal judges acknowledged as evidence a report from a university doctoral candidate that describes Arkansas' 'long history' with racism and resistance to Black voters, but wrote that much of that predates the passage of the 1964 Voting Rights Act.
'Even if he identifies a few scattered examples since then, none are 'reasonably contemporaneous with the challenged decision,' giving us little insight into what the General Assembly may have been thinking four years ago,' the panel wrote.
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