Voting Rights Act doesn’t protect coalitions of racial or ethnic groups challenging political maps, appeals court rules

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Coalitions of minority groups cannot band together to claim that political maps constitute discriminatory gerrymandering, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Galveston County lawsuit.

The 12-6 decision found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections for individual racial or ethnic groups do not extend to multiple groups joining together to claim that political boundaries dilute their votes. The ruling came in a case in which Black and Latino voters jointly sued Galveston County for voter discrimination after the county dismantled a district where people of color made up the majority.

The ruling Thursday reversed a 1988 5th Circuit opinion that found there was nothing that expressly prohibited such coalition claims in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. That decades-old ruling stemmed from a lawsuit alleging that an at-large election system — where all voters elect representatives who serve the entire area, rather than specific geographic districts within it — diluted the votes of a coalition of Black and Hispanic voters.

The court wrote in its new ruling that the Voting Rights Act does not explicitly permit coalition, therefore they have no legal standing.

“Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim,” Judge Edith H. Jones wrote for the majority. “On the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a vote dilution claim as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the plural.”

The ruling only applies to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — the states where the court has jurisdiction. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit is known for its ideologically conservative rulings, often pushing legal interpretation to the right. The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned many of its recent rulings. The plaintiffs have not yet announced if they plan on appealing to the Supreme Court.

The new opinion will hinder minority groups from challenging electoral maps, said Nickolas Spencer, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs.

“The Fifth Circuit decision reverses its own precedent in order to make it more difficult for diverse communities to exercise their right to vote,” Spencer said in a statement. “The Court tells Black and Hispanic Americans that their shared harm cannot be [adjudicated] together. In practice this means it often can't be [adjudicated] at all.”

While the majority claims that this “decision will in no way imperil” the success of the Voting Rights Act, six judges remained unsure.

"To imply, as the majority does, that discrimination is permissible so long as the victims of the discrimination are racially diverse, is not only an absurd conclusion but it is one with grave consequences," Judge Dana M. Douglas wrote in her dissent.

The original case was brought by residents of Galveston County joined by the U.S. Department of Justice, three branches of the NAACP, and a branch of the League of United Latin American Citizens. While this decision kills the plaintiffs Section 2 arguments, the lawsuit included two other pathways for litigation that will now be sent back to district court to be resolved.

Redistricting sparked the case. Galveston County commissioners split up Precinct 3, which previously allowed Black and Latino residents to form political coalitions and elect their preferred representatives. After the 2020 census, the precinct, which included diverse areas with a significant Black population, was redrawn into a smaller district in the predominantly white northwestern part of the county. This change ensured that white voters now make up at least 62% of the electorate in each of the four precincts, effectively diluting the electoral power of Black and Latino communities.

Last October, a federal judge ruled that Galveston County’s redistricting maps violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group — by diluting the voting power of Black and Latino residents.

A month later, a three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit agreed but questioned the precedent that allowed minority coalitions to sue, requesting the full court to review the issue.

The new ruling said that allowing coalitions of different racial or ethnic groups to make vote-dilution claims would complicate drawing redistricting maps and inundate courts with cases that are difficult to litigate.

Historically this has been untrue, according to Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney litigating the case with the Texas Civil Rights Project. She says that coalition claims are rare because it's difficult to prove that different groups share interests and are jointly discriminated against, making the majority's argument less reflective of the actual context and challenges in Voting Rights Act cases.

Voting rights advocates said it was unjust for the appeals court to overturn its own precedent.

“The Fifth Circuit reversed decades of settled law to deny relief to Black and Latino voters seeking nothing more than equal voting power and a voice in their local government,” said Hilary Harris Klein, an attorney for Southern Coalition for Social Justice who represented the voters who sued. “Plaintiffs proved their case at trial, and in response, the appellate court moved the goalpost.”

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