Louisiana legislators gave their final approval Friday to Senate Bill 121, a congressional redistricting map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and gives Republicans a probable additional U.S. House seat ahead of the November midterms. The state Senate approved the final version 28-10 on party lines after the House had passed it 66-36 the day prior. The new map redraws Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields’ 6th District, clustering it around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana, while adding part of Baton Rouge to the majority-Black 2nd District based in New Orleans, currently represented by Democratic Rep. Troy Carter. Gov. Jeff Landry has signed the map into law, according to the legislature’s bill page, making Louisiana the second Southern state to adopt new congressional lines since the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which invalidated the state’s existing court-ordered map and significantly weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The redistricting process set off a cascade of election administration complications. The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Landry suspended Louisiana’s U.S. House party primaries, which had been scheduled for May 16. Lawmakers subsequently approved a bill rescheduling those primaries for November 3, reverting from the semi-closed party primary system Louisiana had adopted to a jungle primary format in which all candidates appear on the same ballot, with any runoffs set for December 12. The qualifying period for the rescheduled November elections runs August 5-7, meaning candidates who had already qualified for the original May 16 primary must re-qualify if they still choose to run. The law also voids all ballots already cast in the U.S. House primaries. Secretary of State Nancy Landry said she was unable to remove the House races from the ballots before the May 16 early voting period began, meaning tens of thousands of voters cast ballots in races that have now been nullified. More than 42,000 people had returned absentee ballots before the governor suspended the elections.
Litigation is expected from multiple directions. The Callais plaintiffs, the white voters who brought the original lawsuit and won at the Supreme Court, filed court papers in the Western District of Louisiana this week arguing that SB 121 still fails to remove race from the map’s structure. “If the Legislature fails to enact a new map by then or enacts SB 121 without any substantial changes to the current structure, Plaintiffs may well ask the Court to schedule proceedings to impose a remedy that fully complies with Callais,” their filing states.
Find us on:
