In a case about gerrymandering in South Carolina, the Brennan Center for Justice said that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito misunderstood its study.
The Supreme Court upheld a congressional district in South Carolina that was drawn by Republicans last week. This overturned a lower court’s ruling that the district’s boundaries were an unconstitutional form of racial gerrymandering.
A group of three judges decided that race was the main reason why the new map was made the way it was. This meant that about 30,000 Black voters in the Charleston area were moved to a different district.
Lawmakers from a Republican-controlled state said the new lines were drawn because of politics, not race, and they took the case to the Supreme Court.
In his opinion on the case, which was decided 6-3, Alito pointed to Brennan Center research from 2021 that showed strict voting rules will make the racial voter turnout gap worse.
People like Alito didn’t understand why a nonpartisan worker with experience in redistricting would have used racial data “as a proxy for partisan data” when he had access to partisan information at the sub-precinct level.
An expert on voting laws and policies at the center named Kevin Morris wrote in a report that Alito’s thought needs to be clarified.
Morris said that South Carolina voters don’t sign up with political groups. It says in a person’s voter file which party primary they are running in. He said it should be a good indicator of how people vote, but it’s not as accurate as self-identification.
Morris wrote, “Alito agrees that race might be a better predictor of vote choice than party affiliation in South Carolina. But he uses our study to guess that the lower relative turnout of nonwhite voters probably makes racial data useless for drawing maps.” “In fact, the opposite.”
When people register to vote in South Carolina, they say what race they are. Their voter files also have information about how they voted going back to the 1990s.
Morris said, “To put it simply, the best place to find out how South Carolina voters will likely vote for a party nominee is in the exact kind of files that the state looked: files with racial data.”
Morris wondered why Alito used their 2021 research when the center had just released a more in-depth report a few months before that said South Carolina is the best example of how race and voting have changed across the country and how the court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision has changed voting trends over the last ten years.
It is more likely for white and nonwhite people in South Carolina to vote than in the rest of the country since 2014. The center found that the gap has grown faster in Charleston County than anywhere else in the state. This is where the Supreme Court case is centered.
In the end, we agree with Alito that “non-white voters turn out at a much lower rate than white voters.” “However, his conclusion that this fact means that racial data can’t be used to make racist maps is just not true,” Morris wrote.
“However, this data can and does show that the Supreme Court’s decision not to protect the voting rights of people of color has led to bigger gaps in participation in places like South Carolina,” he said.
