In some districts without Black majorities, Republicans redrew the maps to their favor. One of those is Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath’s 7th Congressional District in suburban Atlanta.
ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday accepted new Georgia congressional and legislative voting districts that protect Republican partisan advantages, saying the creation of new majority-Black voting districts solved the illegal minority vote dilution that led him to order maps to be redrawn.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, in three separate but similarly worded orders, rejected claims that the new maps don’t do enough to help
“Federal law requires an end to vote dilution everywhere and a real change for injured voters, not reshuffling the same deck,” Savitsky said.
Republicans said the ruling proves they could comply with the order to draw more majority-Black districts while preserving their power. In a written statement, House Speaker Jon Burns, a Newington Republican, called the ruling “a validation of what we put forward.”
The voters and civic groups who sued to overturn the 2021 maps claimed the new ones didn’t fix problems in districts Jones had labeled as illegal. But Jones said lawmakers weren’t confined to reworking only those districts, and that plaintiffs’ objections weren’t enough for him to reject the maps. If he had, he could have adopted maps offered by the plaintiffs or drawn his own.
Jones echoed the state’s claim that approving redrawn maps was not a beauty contest.
“To put it more starkly, plaintiffs contend that their illustrative plans are better remedies than the state’s remedial plans,” he wrote. “Because this court cannot intrude upon the domain of the General Assembly, however, it declines plaintiffs invitation to compare the 2023 remedial plans with plans preferred by plaintiffs and crown the illustrative plans the winners.”
Arguments on the congressional map focused on whether it was legal for lawmakers to dissolve McBath’s district in Gwinnett and Fulton counties — while at the same time drawing a new Black-majority 6th District west of downtown Atlanta. The plaintiffs argue that the state, by dissolving the current 7th District, is newly violating the guarantee of opportunities for minority voters spelled out in Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. The 7th District is majority nonwhite, but not majority Black, with substantial shares of Hispanic and Asian voters as well.
Jones said he didn’t have the evidence needed to act on a Voting Rights Act claim: that Black, Hispanic and Asian voters in the 7th District act as a coalition to elect their choices. He told the plaintiffs they’d have to file a new lawsuit to pursue claims that wiping out McBath’s current district illegally harms minority voters.
