Challengers claim a congressional district in Little Rock was drawn to weaken black voting strength.
By Matthew Vadum
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 3 revived a lawsuit that contests the boundaries of a congressional district in Arkansas that challengers say illegally diluted the voting strength of the black community.
The ruling comes days after the court rejected a claim that a congressional district in South Carolina was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The ruling, which returns the case to a lower court, comes after the Supreme Court made it harder last month to pursue racial gerrymandering claims. The nation’s highest court ordered a lower court to reconsider its decision in light of the ruling from last month.
The lead petitioner was Jackie Williams Simpson, a black voter. The respondent was John Thurston, Arkansas’s Republican secretary of state.
The decision sends the case back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, which previously dismissed the lawsuit on May 25, 2023.
A three-judge panel of the district court rejected the challengers’ argument that the electoral map violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. Section 2 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a large language minority group. Last year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to weaken Section 2. The court declined to do so, holding 5–4 in Allen v. Milligan that the state’s electoral map for congressional elections was racially discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act.
The ruling comes after the Supreme Court upheld on a vote of 6–3 a congressional redistricting plan in South Carolina. In the May 23 decision, the court rejected the claim that the new electoral map was a product of race-based discrimination.
The case was Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.
The court majority held that challengers failed to demonstrate that race was the main factor in the redistricting, as opposed to more routine partisan considerations. While the Supreme Court frowns on racial gerrymandering as constitutionally suspect, it has adopted a hands-off attitude toward partisan gerrymandering.
The seat in South Carolina’s First Congressional District is held by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
In Simpson v. Thurston, the challengers argued that when the Arkansas General Assembly drafted a new electoral map for the state in 2021, it took “the exceptional measure of splitting a community of 140,000 Blacks from a close-knit community in the southern border of the Second Congressional District in Pulaski County, Arkansas, into, not two, but three congressional districts, while simultaneously transferring the virtually all-White Cleburne County into the northern part of the Second Congressional District.”
Those challenging the map brought claims under both the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.
But Arkansas denied that it had any race-related motivations in the redistricting process. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, told the court in a brief that the other side did not “allege any sort of direct evidence of a racial motive.”
The Supreme Court vacated the judgment of the federal district court “for further consideration in light of Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.”
Lawyers call this process GVR—grant, vacate, and remand.
It’s unclear when the federal district court will begin reconsidering its decision.
Meanwhile, activist groups are pursuing a separate lawsuit about Arkansas redistricting that’s expected to be taken up next year.
The case is known as Christian Ministerial Alliance v. Thurston.
The map challengers claim that Arkansas’s Second Congressional District—held by Rep. French Hill, a Republican—is a racial gerrymander. They say the redistricting plan “cracks” Pulaski County’s “large and effective Black community” and divides those voters among three of the state’s congressional districts.
The map is “a textbook case of ‘cracking’ a minority community to suppress its political voice. And this cracking is intentional,” they said.
In cracking the black communities in the county into three separate districts, the state Legislature “actively disregarded traditional redistricting principles and contradicted its own stated guiding principles.”
The challengers are asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas to block the map, compel the state to develop a constitutionally compliant plan, and put the state under a preclearance regime as provided in Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act. Preclearance under Section 3 means the U.S. Department of Justice and the federal courts assign election-day monitors to polling places to ensure compliance with the law.
The district court denied a motion to dismiss from the bench. In a follow-up explanatory order on Feb. 2, the court stated that Arkansas was advancing weak arguments.
“We recognize that Arkansas has an innocent explanation for the new map: racial effects were purely coincidental. … It may turn out that geography rather than race played the predominant role in the General Assembly’s decision, but a motion to dismiss is not the time to make that call,” the court stated.
The trial is currently scheduled for March 24, 2025.
It is unclear when the federal district court will begin reconsidering its decision.
The new decision seems likely to benefit Republicans, who, in the November elections, will be defending their razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. All four U.S. House seats and two U.S. Senate seats in Arkansas are occupied by Republicans.
