The U.S. Supreme Court will examine Wednesday whether a southern state relied on racial considerations to redesign the election map, “deporting” 30,000 black voters in his constituency.
Since Republicans only have a majority in the House of Representatives by a few votes, any change in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence can determine the room for maneuver the next president of the United States.
Especially since there are already disputes over electoral maps in a dozen states.
In the United States, political parties can draw constituency boundaries based on their interests, what they call “gerrymandering”, a legal practice generally speaking, but prohibited when done on racial grounds rather than political affiliation.
Last week, a federal court validated Alabama’s new electoral map (South), including two majority African-American constituencies instead of one.
The court and later the Supreme Court invalidated the map adopted by the Republican majority, claiming it violated the Voting Rights Act.
- This civil rights law passed in 1965 aimed to prevent former segregationist states in the south of the country from denying African Americans the right to vote.
Georgia and Louisiana pending resources in a new electoral delimitation, which includes one more district, with a majority African-American population, in each of these two southern states led by Republicans.
The nine justices of the Supreme Court spoke this Wednesday on the map of South Carolina, where the majority is Republican “30,000 African-American citizens deported” in Charleston (south), that is, 62% of the black population, according to the trial judges.
“Race factor is the main factor” in this delimitation, said this court, concluding that the state authorities practiced “racial gerrymandering.”
The largely conservative Supreme Court must distinguish between political affiliation and racial considerations, which often overlap.
For example, both of the South Carolina like Alabama, Of the seven congressmen in the House of Representatives, six are white Republicans and one is a black Democrat.
- It is believed that the court may issue a decision by the end of January 2024.
For civil rights activists, such as the influential ACLU, Time is of the essence as the November 2024 presidential election approaches.
“Black voters in the 1st District will have to vote once under this unconstitutional map in 2022,” cried Sophia Lin Lakin, handles election issues for the ACLU. “They don’t have to go through this again in the next few years.” election”, he said.
