DeSantis-Backed Map Violated Black Voters’ Rights, Court Says

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) violated the state constitution and discriminated against Black voters when he overhauled a northern congressional district previously held by a Black Democrat, a state trial court ruled Saturday.

DeSantis’ maps violated the 2010 amendment to the Florida Constitution, which explicitly prohibits maps that diminish the power of racial minority voters to select the candidate of their choice, Second Judicial Circuit Court Judge J. Lee Marsh wrote in his opinion.

Non-diminishment “protects against backsliding in existing districts where a minority group has had the ability to elect a candidate of their choice,” he said. “Florida’s history of voting related discrimination—as told through Florida case law over the years—bears out this need.”

The case, which is likely to be appealed, is limited to the state’s former Fifth Congressional District. The state defendants didn’t dispute that in 2020 that district had sufficient Black voting population for residents to send their preferred candidate to Washington, former Rep. Al Lawson (D), who carried it by more than 100,000 votes.

After the 2020 Census redistricting, that wasn’t the case. In 2022, Lawson squared off against incumbent Rep. Neal Dunn (R) in the newly-shaped Second Congressional District and lost by roughly 60,000 votes.

“Regardless of who would bear the burden of strict scrutiny, that burden would be satisfied with respect to a North Florida district that complies with the non-diminishment provision, including either of the versions of CD-5 in Plan 8015 or 8019,” wrote Marsh, whom DeSantis appointed to the bench in in 2018.

With the facts in stone, a trial that was scheduled to last two weeks morphed into a four-hour oral argument in August, focused on the legal test for when the state’s prohibition of minority voter diminishment kicks in. The state defendants—including Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R)—argued the state should only be held to that rule when minority voters exceed 50% of the voters in a district. Marsh sided with the voters challenging that reasoning.

The “Secretary’s arguments have no basis under either federal precedent or Florida Supreme Court precedent,” Marsh said.

Byrd also said the new district was undoing a prior racial gerrymander that intentionally placed Black voters into the Fifth District, and bringing it back would violate the US Constitution.

The “area had a district that stretched 200 miles” from Duval County, which contains Jacksonville, to Leon and Gadsden Counties, in the Panhandle, “connected by a slender, 3-mile strip north of Tallahassee,” Byrd said in a brief. “At either end, the map surgically packed black voters into the district, heeding no traditional districting criteria like compactness or geographic and political boundaries.”

Marsh didn’t buy that premise, and he ordered the state Legislature to create a new congressional map changing this district.

“Not only is there no specific district under which this Court could evaluate whether racial gerrymandering occurred, but Defendants also lack standing to raise a racial gerrymandering challenge in the first place. Even if this Court were to assume which district were at issue, Defendants have not proved that race predominated in the drawing of the district,” Marsh said.

An appeal would potentially provide the state’s conservative Supreme Court an avenue to create a new standard for the state’s anti-gerrymandering litigation. In prior precedent, the state’s high court ruled that there was no specific threshold percentage of minority voting age population necessary to bring a diminishment case.

Byrd and the Florida Attorney General’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case is Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Inst., Inc. v. Byrd, Fla. Cir. Ct., No. 2022-ca-000666, 9/2/23.