US judges reject new Louisiana voting map with second majority-Black district

A new congressional map giving Louisiana a second majority-Black House district was rejected on Tuesday by a panel of three federal judges, fueling new uncertainty about district boundaries as the state prepares for fall congressional elections.

The 2-1 ruling forbids the use of a map drawn up in January by the legislature after a different federal judge blocked a map from 2022. The earlier map maintained a single Black-majority district and five mostly white districts, in a state with a population that is about one-third Black.

“We will of course be seeking supreme court review,” the state attorney general, Liz Murrill, said on social media. “The jurisprudence and litigation involving redistricting has made it impossible to not have federal judges drawing maps. It’s not right and they need to fix it.”

The governor, Jeff Landry, and Murrill had backed the new map in a January legislative session after a different federal judge threw out a map with only one mostly Black district.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former attorney general Eric Holder, said backers of the new map will probably seek an emergency order from the supreme court to keep the new map in place while appeals are pursued.

The US district judges David Joseph and Robert Summerhays, both of whom were nominated to the bench by former president Donald Trump, said the newest map violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment because “race was the predominate factor” driving its creation.

Judge Carl Stewart dissented, saying the majority gave too little weight to the political motivations involved in drawing the map.

“The panel majority is correct in noting that this is a mixed motive case,” Stewart wrote. “But to note this and then to subsequently make a conclusory determination as to racial predominance is hard to comprehend.”

The ruling means continued uncertainty over what the November election map will look like. Another federal district judge, Shelly Dick of Baton Rouge, has ruled that the state is probably in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act because it divides Black voters not included in majority-Black district 2 among five other congressional districts.

But Tuesday’s ruling from the divided federal panel noted that “outside of south-east Louisiana, the state’s Black population is dispersed”. The majority criticized the new mostly Black district, which stretched across the state from Shreveport in the north-west into south-east Louisiana, linking black populations from the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge metro areas.

The panel set a 6 May status conference. Meanwhile, the case before Dick in Baton Rouge is still alive, and state election officials say they need to know the district boundaries by 15 May. The sign-up period for the fall elections in Louisiana is in mid-July.

The decision gives new hope to Representative Garret Graves, a white Republican incumbent whose district was seriously altered by the new map. And it raises questions for state senator Cleo Fields, a Democrat and former Congress member who had declared he would run in the new district.

Representative Troy Carter, the only Democrat and only Black member of the state’s current congressional delegation, criticized the ruling.

“This is just plain WRONG,” Carter posted on the social platform X on Tuesday evening.