COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A group that works to protect and expand voting rights is asking South Carolina’s highest court to order lawmakers to redraw the state’s U.S. House districts because they lean too heavily toward the Republicans.
South Carolina’s congressional map held two months ago 6-3 US Supreme Court ruling which said the state General Assembly did not use race to draw districts based on the 2020 Census.
These new maps cemented Republicans’ 6-1 advantage in the U.S. House after Democrats surprisingly flipped seats two years earlier.
The lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters uses testimony and evidence from this case to argue that the US residential districts violate the South Carolina Constitution’s requirement for free and open elections and that all people be equally protected by the law.
Gerrymandering districts so that one party can gain much more political power than it should based on voting patterns is cheating, said Allen Chaney, legal director of the South Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is handling the lawsuit.
“South Carolina voters deserve to vote with their neighbors and for their votes to carry equal weight. This case is about restoring representative democracy in South Carolina, and I am hopeful that the South Carolina Supreme Court will do just that,” Chaney said Monday in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed against the leadership of the Republican-dominated state Senate and state House, which approved the new maps. in January 2022.
“This new process is yet another attempt by special interests to achieve through the courts what they cannot achieve at the ballot box – disregarding representative government. I firmly believe that these assertions will be considered as baseless as other challenges to these lines have been,” Republican House Speaker Murrell Smith said in a statement.
The suit said South Carolina lawmakers divided counties, cities and communities to ensure Republican voters were placed in the Charleston-to-Beaufort area’s 1st District, which was flipped by a Democrat in 2018 before Republican Nancy Mace flipped it in 2020.
Democratic-leaning voters were then moved to the 6th District, drawn to have a majority of minority voters. The district includes downtown Charleston and Columbia, which are more than 100 miles apart and have little in common.
The ACLU’s lawsuit claims that in a state where Republican former President Donald Trump won 55% of the vote in 2020, none of the seven congressional districts are all that competitive with Democrats overly crowded into the 6th District.
Five districts faced both major parties in 2022 under the new maps. Republicans won four of the seats by a margin of 56% to 65% of the vote. Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn won his district with 62%.
“There are no competitive districts in the current congressional map (i.e., districts where Democrats represent between 45% and 55% of the seats). This is despite the fact that…simulations show that following traditional redistricting principles would have led mapmakers to draw a map with two competitive voting districts,” the ACLU wrote in its lawsuit.
The civil rights organization is asking the state Supreme Court to resolve the lawsuit directly rather than holding hearings and trials in a lower court.
Kentucky, Pennsylvania and New Mexico have similar language in their state constitutions and courts have ruled that drawing voting districts to ensure one political party’s power violates the right to equal protection and free and fair elections, the ACLU said in a statement.
