Florida High Court to Hear Case Alleging Congressional Map Is Racially Discriminatory 

The Florida Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Thursday in a case contending that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and state lawmakers illegally diminished the electoral power of Black voters when they redrew the state’s congressional map after the 2010 census.

The map challenged in Black Voters Matter v. Byrd has a strange and twisting history. The Republican-controlled legislature originally passed a map that largely kept in place a court-drawn map from the prior decade, “leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage” in the battleground Sunshine State, ProPublica reported. The report described DeSantis as “incensed.”

He rejected the GOP-controlled legislature’s map through a gubernatorial veto and then proposed a revised version that was much friendlier to Republicans — strong-arming the legislature into passing it in a special session.

The plaintiffs, including voting rights organizations and individual voters, argue that DeSantis’s map violates unique state law protections for minority voters enshrined in constitutional amendments put in place by voters in 2010.

Analysis by FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted that the new map would add at least four congressional seats for Republicans compared to the legislature’s original map. DeSantis’s map also “wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state,” the ProPublica report said. Most notably, a near majority-Black district approved by the state high court in 2015 was divided among four separate majority-white districts.

Therein lies the legal dilemma: the Fair Districts Amendments of the Florida Constitution don’t allow congressional maps that disfavor a political party or discriminate against racial and language minorities.

Adopted in 2010 with 63 percent of the vote, the amendments forbid the legislature from drawing districts “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” They also provide that “districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.” (This last portion of the amendment about diminishing minorities’ voting power is referred to as the “non-diminishment provision.”)

At the heart of Black Voters Matter is whether Florida’s Fifth Congressional District — the Black opportunity district stretching between Jacksonville and Tallahassee that was broken into four parts — was unconstitutionally divided to harm Black voters.

The plaintiffs argue DeSantis’s map is a straightforward violation of the state constitution because it “eliminates a North Florida district in which Black voters were previously able to elect their candidate of choice.”

“Under this Court’s binding precedent,” the plaintiffs continue, “that alone is sufficient to prove unlawful diminishment” under the Florida Constitution.

The defendants — including Florida lawmakers and the secretary of state — counter that “to establish a non-diminishment violation” the plaintiffs must “prove that an alternative district configuration could be drawn that complies with both the state constitution’s non-diminishment provision and the federal Constitution’s prohibition against racial gerrymandering.”

They say the plaintiffs’ two suggested alternative maps fail this standard because both purposefully maintain a Jacksonville-to-Tallahassee Black-plurality district that cannot be explained or justified as anything other than an exercise in race-based line drawing, making both unconstitutional racial gerrymanders that violate the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

A state trial judge declared DeSantis’s map unconstitutional in 2023, but an appellate court reversed.

The plaintiffs now have a heavy lift ahead of them in Florida’s highest court. The conservative Florida Supreme Court is entirely made up by Republican appointees, with five appointed by DeSantis, and has reversed prior precedents in areas such as reproductive rights. Moreover, under existing precedent maps produced by the legislature enjoy a “presumption of validity” from the Florida courts.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, it won’t be decided in time to impact the 2024 congressional races. This election cycle, Florida will use the DeSantis-authored map. But should the court strike down the map, that decision could put in place a new map for elections starting as soon as 2025, and any impact will continue until after the next census in 2030.

The impact won’t just be felt in Florida. Arguably, DeSantis’s congressional map — with its four new Republican seats — contributed to the party winning a single-digit majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022. Thus, the fate of future control of Congress in 2025 may well hinge on how the Florida Supreme Court rules in this case. 

You can watch the arguments in Black Voters Matter v. Byrd here on Thursday, September 12. 

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, a Brennan Center fellow, and the author of the book Corporatocracy.

Suggested Citation: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Florida High Court to Hear Case Alleging Congressional Map Is Racially Discriminatory, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Sept. 10, 2024), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/florida-high-court-hear-case-alleging-congressional-map-racially.