South Carolina Republicans can use discriminatory map for 2024, court rules

A federal court will allow South Carolina Republicans to use their congressional map for the 2024 election, it said on Thursday, despite an earlier finding that the same plan discriminates against Black voters. The decision is a big win for Republicans, who were aided by the US supreme court’s slow action on the case.

In January 2023, a three-judge panel struck down the state’s first congressional district, which is currently represented by Nancy Mace, a Republican. The judges said legislative Republicans had impermissibly used race when they redrew it after the 2020 census. As part of an effort to make it more solidly Republican, lawmakers removed 30,000 Black voters from the district into a neighboring one. Republicans argued that they moved the voters to achieve partisan ends, which is legal. The district was extremely competitive in 2020, but Mace easily won the redrawn version in 2022.

The ruling is a significant boon to House Republicans, who are trying to keep a razor-thin majority in Congress’s lower chamber this year.

The US supreme court heard oral arguments in the case, Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, on 11 October and seemed poised allow the GOP map to remain in place. But the court has not yet issued a decision. The justices still could potentially order the state to come up with a new map before the 2024 election, though that seems less likely as the state’s 11 June primary approaches. The supreme court has adopted in recent years an idea called the Purcell principle in which it does not disrupt maps or election practices as an election nears.

“A second election under an infirm map is justice delayed when plaintiffs have made every effort to get a decision and remedy before another election