Supreme Court Allows South Carolina’s Racial Gerrymander To Stand

The Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision that found that South Carolina Republicans improperly used race to gerrymander the state’s 1st Congressional District in a Thursday decision.

A three-judge federal district court panel ruled in 2023 that the lines drawn in the state’s 1st Congressional District were an illegal racial gerrymander. The legislature’s movement of Black voters out and white voters in amounted to a “bleaching” of the district, the district court said in a ruling that Republicans in the state legislature later appealed to the Supreme Court.

But the conservative majority on the Supreme Court disagreed in a 6-3 vote that reversed and remanded the lower court decision. The majority argued that the complaint brought by the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP relied on “circumstantial” evidence that the state legislature used race when it drew the 1st District’s lines. Instead, they sided with South Carolina’s argument that the state’s movement of Black voters in and white voters out of the district was merely a side effect of their attempt at partisan gerrymandering.

The decision casts a bright light on the difficulties in determining when a state, particularly one like South Carolina that has a Black population twice the national average and presents a high degree of racial polarization with most Black voters and white voters supporting different parties, uses race or partisanship to redraw district lines.

And since the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts cannot adjudicate claims of partisan gerrymandering, as the Constitution has nothing to say about it, states simply need to show that they only relied on partisan information, like party registration, when engaging in