Supreme Court Sides With Republicans Over South Carolina Voting Map

The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had deemed an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that resulted in the “bleaching of African American voters” from a district.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in early 2023 that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.

The panel put its decision on hold while Republican lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court, and the parties asked the justices to render a decision by Jan. 1. After that deadline passed, the panel said in March that the 2024 election would have to take place under the map it had rejected as unconstitutional.

“With the primary election procedures rapidly approaching, the appeal before the Supreme Court still pending and no remedial plan in place,” the panel wrote, “the ideal must bend to the practical.”

In effect, the Supreme Court’s inaction had decided the case for the current election cycle.

The contested district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.

The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”