Florida Republicans racially gerrymandered two state senate districts, court hears

Republicans in Florida racially gerrymandered two key state senate districts to disenfranchise Black voters and skew results in the Tampa Bay area, a panel of judges has heard.

In one district, they took a small chunk of St Petersburg heavy with minority voters and added it to an area of Tampa in a different county, and across a 10-mile waterway, leaving the remainder of its electorate “artificially white”, the court was told.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, representing voters at a four-day trial in Tampa last week, said the state’s defense that the waters of Tampa Bay made the new district contiguous was ridiculous, pointing out in the lawsuit that “manatees don’t vote”.

“These are cities on opposite sides of the bay and there’s no way to go directly between them,” Caroline McNamara, an ACLU staff attorney, said.

Related: Ron DeSantis’s fall from grace: ‘He’s completely crashed to the ground’

“You either have to go across 10 miles of open ocean at the mouth of Tampa Bay, or you have to cut through other districts in the area through the north end.”

The case has direct parallels in previous moves by Republican officials in Florida to manipulate voting districts to their advantage by undercutting Black voting power.

Ron DeSantis, the hard right governor, was behind a move in 2022 to redraw congressional maps to secure four additional seats, a plan that resulted in white Republicans winning all four races in northern Florida while cutting the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.

“It was a lynching,” Brenda Holt, a Black commissioner in Gadsden county, told the Guardian at the time.

In the Tampa Bay case, the three judges will give their ruling at a later date on whether the Republican-held senate’s 2022 redistricting process was unconstitutional. A decision in favor of the plaintiffs would require a redrawing of Florida’s 16th and 18th senate districts, subject to appeal.

Currently, the state senator for the split district is Darryl Rouson, a Democrat, who maintains offices in both St Petersburg and Tampa, and must drive through the middle of another district to get from one to the other.

“It’s like all of the voters have half a senator, half of the time. It’s crazy,” McNamara said.

“Every year there’s big celebrations on Martin Luther King Day in January, and he has to alternate years whether he’s in St Petersburg or Tampa, because he can’t do both.”

One of the three plaintiffs, Keto Nord Hodges, a Black Hillsborough county voter, told the court he felt underrepresented. “We don’t really see Senator Rouson in Tampa. I can’t remember the last time I saw him,” he said.

While the Tampa side of the district Rouson represents was always reliably Democratic, and he secured almost twice the number of votes than his Republican opponent in the 2022 election, the removal of Black voters from St Petersburg diluted their voting power in the newly created district there, the lawsuit states.

Republican Nick DiCeglie, who is white, coasted to victory over his Democratic challenger Eunic Ortiz, who is Hispanic and openly gay, in 2022 by more than 30,000 votes in one of the country’s most diverse cities.

Effectively, the ACLU argued, the maps represent racial gerrymandering because they pack about half of the region’s Black population into a single one of the its five senate districts.

“This trial laid bare what many communities have long felt, that Florida’s mapmakers chose politics over fairness,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement.

“When lawmakers choose to prioritize outdated assumptions about where Black voters ‘belong’ over meaningful representation, it reinforces structural inequities. We’re here to ensure that voters in Tampa and St Petersburg are no longer crammed into one district in a way that diminishes the value of their votes.”

McNamara dismissed the arguments of lawyers for Cord Byrd, the Florida secretary of state, and Ben Albritton, the Florida senate president, that the maps complied with state law requiring any redistricting process to ensure minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

“They just thought this is a box to check they probably wanted to do what they needed to do but not more,” she said. “We say that they didn’t even do what they needed to do, like they just didn’t take it seriously, they were dismissive throughout the process.”

The Florida department of state did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

McNamara said that although DeSantis had no direct role in drawing the senate maps, the process took place against the governor’s backdrop of “disenfranchisement and attacks on communities of color”.

She said: “You could say this is just a technical thing, or it’s about numbers, and sure, who cares if it crosses water?

“But the fact they’re like, ‘who cares if these two completely far-flung areas are joined together without any real connection, and the only basis for doing it is the color of the people’s skin?’ Well, that’s exactly the issue that the 14th amendment of the constitution has a problem with.”