Federal Judge Steve Jones has ruled that legislative district lines in Georgia covering races for Congress and both chambers of its state legislature be redone to provide more opportunities for Black communities in the state before the next elections.
The dispute mirrors the court challenges that have stemmed from Congressional redistricting in Alabama, where the federal judiciary has demanded — repeatedly and consistently — that an additional district giving greater electoral say to the state’s large Black population be put in place. That court battle went to a special master, meaning a court-appointed third party, after state officials in Alabama resisted the closest compliance with what the courts had actually been saying.
As for Georgia, the demand from Jones is for an additional Congressional district boosting the electoral power of Black voters. Jones “also ordered the state to draw two new Black-majority districts in Georgia’s 56-member state Senate and five new Black-majority districts in its 180-member state House,” the Associated Press summarized. Republicans currently have most of the state’s Congressional and state legislative seats (the latter category covering both chambers). Appeals were possible, and the timing of those foreseeable further disputes could impact when any new legislative district lines are actually implemented.
Already, Republicans in the Georgia state Senate expressed opposition to Jones’ decision — though it was unclear at this stage whether they’d go as far as Republicans in Alabama, who left a federal court basically flabbergasted by their earlier resistance to actually implementing greater reforms to their map of Congressional districts. They’d originally crafted just a single Congressional district with a recognized lean towards electoral power for Black communities, though Black residents comprise some one-fourth of the state population in Alabama.
In Georgia, it was similarly noted that state officials had left the status of marginalized communities’ representation in legislative district maps essentially as-is, though non-white communities were primarily responsible for Georgia’s population expansion from the last redistricting period to now. The lack of proportionality between the district maps and the actual populations helped provide the groundwork for these serious disputes. Read more at this link.
