Every 10 years, South Carolina state lawmakers are tasked with redrawing the lines for congressional districts based on census data. Following the 2020 Census, lawmakers violated the South Carolina Constitution when they manipulated the map to create an artificial Republican advantage in the First Congressional District, a coastal district traditionally anchored in Charleston. This is a practice known as partisan gerrymandering, and lawmakers admitted to it in court.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of South Carolina, and Duffy & Young LLC filed a lawsuit challenging partisan gerrymandering of South Carolina’s congressional districts. We are asking the South Carolina Supreme Court to end partisan gerrymandering and strike down South Carolina’s congressional redistricting plan. Our case is built on the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and open” elections and an “equal right to elect officers” for all qualified South Carolinians.
Why this case?
Gerrymandering of any kind is cheating. It is a tool for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around.
Previously, in Alexander v. SC NAACP, we argued that the redrawing of Congressional District 1 was a clear example of racial gerrymandering that used race as a proxy for political party. In defending the map, leading South Carolina lawmakers argued that they drew the congressional redistricting plan strictly for partisan gain and that they used party affiliation — not race — to decide which voters to remove from CD1.
“The panel acknowledged that the General Assembly pursued a political goal of increasing District 1’s Republican vote share. It achieved that goal by moving Republicans into the district and Democrats out of the district," said John Gore, an attorney representing South Carolina lawmakers, in oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Alexander v. SC NAACP.
“[T]he Enacted Plan is the only plan that keeps District 1 majority-Republican and maintains the 6-1 partisan composition in the congressional delegation,” the state's legal team argued in a jurisdictional statement for the same case.
This lawsuit takes South Carolina lawmakers at their word and asks the State Supreme Court to restore representative democracy to South Carolina.
The latest
We filed our petition to the South Carolina Supreme Court on July 29, 2024.
