This month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision finding that Alabama’s congressional map violates the rights of Black voters will likely lead to Louisiana’s congressional map being redrawn prior to the 2024 election, a redistricting expert said.
Doug Spencer, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, who manages the All About Redistricting website, said last week’s court ruling in Allen v. Milligan found that Alabama’s map violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA).This means the state will have to create a second district where minorities have a greater opportunity to choose an elected representative.
Spencer also pointed to multiple parallels between the situations in Alabama and Louisiana. In both states, federal district courts held that the maps violated the VRA and that the state lawmakers would need to revise them.
“In both cases, the state appealed the lower court’s ruling, and in both cases the appeals court denied the state’s petition,” Spencer said in an email to the Louisiana Record. “In both cases, the state then appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. In February 2022, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Alabama’s appeal and ‘stayed’ (or paused) the lower court’s ruling in the meantime.”
The plaintiffs in another Louisiana case seeking to overturn recently drawn maps of the state House and Senate districts last week filed a motion to lift the stay in their federal lawsuit based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alabama decision.
Gov. John Bel Edwards welcomed the Alabama ruling.
“As I said when I vetoed it, Louisiana's current congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act,” Edwards said in a prepared statement. “Louisiana’s voting population is one-third Black. We know that in compliance with the principles of the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana can and should have a congressional map where two of our six districts are majority Black. Today's decision reaffirms that.”
Once the stay on the Louisiana lawsuit is lifted, Spencer said, the defendant, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Andoin, could again appeal to the Fifth Circuit of Appeal, focusing on the merits of the case.
“Based on the briefing and the Fifth Circuit’s response in 2022, I do not think they would side with Louisiana,” he said, “and so I think the state will ultimately be required to draw a new map. But the exact timing of when the Legislature will take up the task is not yet certain.”