On Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued a per curiam opinion rejecting the claims of three groups of plaintiffs in the consolidated cases (McConchie, Contreras, and East St. Louis NAACP) against the state legislative district maps, which the legislature approved in September. The claims included allegations of racial gerrymandering and minority vote dilution in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
In regards to the votings rights claims, the court characterized the plaintiff’s view of the maps as a failure to “maximize” minority electoral success, and warned that the Supreme Court has admonished that “[f]ailure to maximize cannot be the measure of § 2” because “reading § 2 to define dilution as any failure to maximize tends to obscure the very object of the statute and to run counter to its textually stated purpose.”
In regards to the racial gerrymandering claims, the court stated that “neither set of Plaintiffs has proved that race predominated in the configuration of any of the challenged districts. Indeed, the record could not be more clear that partisan politics—a legally acceptable criterion—controlled that decision. Read the opinion highlights below:
In the end, we find that the boundaries for Illinois House and Senate Districts set out in SB 927 neither violate the Voting Rights Act nor the Constitution. The record shows ample evidence of crossover voting to defeat any claim of racially polarized voting sufficient to deny Latino and Black voters of the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice in the challenged districts. And the record also shows that even if race was a factor in the drawing of at least some of these districts, it was not the predominant factor as to any single district, and thus the resulting maps do not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Instead, the voluminous evidence submitted by the parties overwhelmingly establishes that the Illinois mapmakers were motivated principally by partisan political considerations.
We recognize that partisan gerrymanders are controversial. . . Critics maintain that they distort our democracy, noting that at its most extreme, “the practice amounts to ‘rigging elections.’ . . . These are matters for the people of Illinois to continue debating. Levers other than federal courts are available to them, whether they are state statutes, state constitutions, and even entreaties to Congress, if they wish to change the current process. See Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2507–08. Our role as federal judges is limited and does not extend to complaints about excessive partisanship in the drawing of legislative districts.
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