Major win: Supreme Court reverses ruling that protected Virginia GOP's legislative gerrymander

[CousinIT]

On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court ruled for plaintiffs who had argued that 12 of Virginia’s Republican-drawn state House of Delegates districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The high court overturned a previous district court ruling that had found Virginia did not impermissibly use race. They remanded the case back to the district court for reconsideration using a different legal standard that makes it much more likely that many of these challenged districts could ultimately be invalidated.

Republican legislators admitted to using a hard population threshold of 55 percent African American when they redrew state House districts that already had a black majority. This was done without consideration as to whether that proportion was actually necessary to elect black voters’ representatives of choice under the Voting Rights Act. In most cases, the needed proportion was likely below that number. By packing black voters into a few heavily black districts, legislators made it harder for black voters to elect their preferred candidates in neighboring seats.

However, the district court ruled that because legislators’ map didn’t flagrantly override other traditional redistricting criteria like compactness, it wasn’t immediately obvious that race “predominated” the decision-making process. Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling faulted the district court for using the wrong legal standard, holding that plaintiffs in racial gerrymandering cases like this one did not need to prove that the state had violated traditional redistricting criteria like compactness.

This distinction is important because not all gerrymanders have odd shapes, and it’s often far easier for plaintiffs to prove that a map has a racially discriminatory impact than to show that those drawing it acted with discriminatory intent. The case will now go back to the district court, where plaintiffs won’t have to meet the much higher burden of proving that legislators subordinated other criteria to race.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/1/1638995/-Major-win-Supreme-Court-reverses-ruling-that-protected-Virginia-GOP-s-legislative-gerrymander

[gopiscrap]

1. Excellent

[Jelf]

2. Google map of 11 Virginia districts remanded by US Supreme Court

Here is a Google map that shows the boundaries of the 11 remanded Virginia House districts. For more information, you can click “Map Tips” in the upper left corner.

Map link: https://goo.gl/hbky2v

The map is displayed by Gmap4. I am the developer of that enhanced Google map viewer.

[gopiscrap]

8. Welcome to DU

[CanonRay]

3. So this was based on the 2010 census

which means we've already had 3 of the 5 state elections until the 2020 census. I guess better late than never.

[phylny]

4. I don't understand what the gerrymandering did in this case

(please be kind!)

So, did they group lots of African American voters together to concentrate a larger population of them in one area? So, they knew that one district was already majority African American, so they gathered more into that district because it was already going to go for Democrats? In that way, there would be fewer African Americans in other, adjacent areas?

[paleotn]

7. Same thing the Rethugs did in NC

Concentrate African Americans in a few districts, eliminating their ability to impact the majority of districts in a state. The point being that Democrats dominate in a limited number of districts, winning handily, while Rethugs win, sometimes just squeaking by, in the majority of districts. That's one of the reasons for the recent phenomenon of there being more Democratic voters than Rethugs in all congressional races combined, but Rethugs still win the majority of house seats.

[smirkymonkey]

5. K&R

[Lucinda]

6. KNR