Coalitions of minority groups cannot band together to claim that political maps constitute discriminatory gerrymandering, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Galveston County lawsuit.
The 12-6 decision found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections for individual racial or ethnic groups do not extend to multiple groups joining together to claim that political boundaries dilute their votes. The ruling came in a case in which Black and Latino voters jointly sued Galveston County for voter discrimination after the county dismantled a district where people of color made up the majority.
The ruling Thursday reversed a 1988 5th Circuit opinion that found there was nothing that expressly prohibited such coalition claims in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. That decades-old ruling stemmed from a lawsuit alleging that an at-large election system — where all voters elect representatives who serve the entire area, rather than specific geographic districts within it — diluted the votes of a coalition of Black and Hispanic voters.
