Attorney General Alan Wilson fights for states’ authority to draw voting districts

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson is fighting for states’ authority to draw voting districts by filing a 22-state friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court of the United States. The case concerns the voting districts that the state of Texas recently redrew, which were struck down by a federal court.

“This case is important to the state of South Carolina, and, in fact, the very first words of our brief cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a recent South Carolina case, saying, ‘Redistricting constitutes a traditional domain of state legislative authority,’” Attorney General Wilson said. “When the district court ruled against the new Texas voting map, it ignored the Court’s precedent in that South Carolina case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. We’re fighting to make sure that South Carolina controls drawing South Carolina’s voting districts, as the Supreme Court ruled it should.”

In that South Carolina ruling, the Supreme Court required anyone suing to advance racial gerrymandering claims to provide an alternative map that could meet the legislature’s goals in a race-neutral way. In the Texas case, the plaintiffs made no effort to meet that requirement and even claimed that drawing an alternative map was impossible at this stage.

The attorneys general write that racial gerrymandering is clearly unconstitutional, and that states cannot intentionally sort voters based only on race. However, the problem is that race and political party are sometimes correlated, and drawing voting lines based on politics may yield similar lines to drawing them based on race. That’s why the Supreme Court came up with a common-sense solution to that problem—the alternative-map requirement in the South Carolina case.

Joining Attorney General Wilson in the brief are the states of Missouri, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

You can read the brief here.