Fifth Circuit Rejects Minority Coalitions’ Texas Voting Map Suit

Different coalitions of minority voters can’t band together to pursue claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a divided US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled.

In a 12-6 decision, the New Orleans-based court said Hispanic and Black voters in Texas’s Galveston County can’t team up to challenge a map for local commissioners, since the groups individually lack population numbers to qualify for protection under Section 2 of the law.

“Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim,” Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote Thursday 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 overrules the circuit’s 36-year-old precedent holding that distinct minority groups may aggregate their populations for purposes of vote dilution claims under Section 2.

In the present case, a Trump-appointed district judge cited the 1988 ruling in finding that the map violated Section 2 and blocked Galveston County from using it. A Fifth Circuit panel affirmed the ruling, but called for the full court to reconsider the decades-old precedent authorizing minority coalition claims.

The majority concluded that “coalition claims do not comport with Section 2’s statutory language or with Supreme Court cases.”

The minority groups joined the US Justice Department in bringing the suit.

A dissent led by Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee, said the majority “finally dismantled the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in this circuit, leaving four decades of en banc precedent flattened in its wake.” The dissent said the majority disregarded a Supreme Court 1991 decision that said “the VRA should be interpreted in a manner that provides ‘the broadest possible scope’ in combating racial discrimination.

The ruling is the latest blow to the VRA from a conservative appeals court. The Eighth Circuit last year ruled that there is no “private right of action” under the same section of the law, a move that would allow only the Justice Department to bring forward lawsuits alleging gerrymandering along racial lines.

The case is Petteway v. Galveston Cnty., 5th Cir. en banc, No. 23-40582, 8/1/24.