ATLANTA (AP) — The state of Georgia is seeking another showdown with the Supreme Court over the Voting Rights Act, asking a federal appeals court Thursday to interpret the 1965 law in a way that could make it much harder to to prove that minority votes have been illegally diluted.
An attorney for the state on Thursday asked a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta to overturn a lower court ruling that required lawmakers to designate more Black-majority voting districts.
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has argued in lawsuits that the Voting Rights Act is being abused to boost Democratic electoral chances and that white voters favor Republicans for non-racial reasons.
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Georgia Attorney General Stephen Petrany represented the state in his appeal, saying the evidence failed to prove that white people vote the way they do because of race in the constituencies that Republicans drew.
“It is not covered if the majority simply outvotes the minority based on political polarization,” Petrany said.
But attorneys for the federal government and the groups that sued to reshape Georgia’s congressional and legislative plans say Georgia is trying to convince judges to set a new, harder-to-prove standard that would prevent lawsuits over the Voting Rights Act. could hinder, less than two years later. the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a separate challenge from Alabama to the landmark law.
Abha Khanna, a lawyer for some of the groups that have sued to overturn the maps, said that in Georgia, black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats and white voters overwhelmingly support Republicans.
“The secretary cannot think of any non-racial explanation for why black and white voters in Georgia are so neatly segregated into separate political parties,” Khana said.
Among those defending the lower court’s decision was Noah Bokat-Lindell, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, who on Thursday continued the federal government’s involvement in the case despite new leadership from the department under President Donald Trump, which ordered a freeze on certain civil rights. dispute.
The Voting Rights Act was passed to ban racial discrimination in elections, including drawing districts in a way that effectively blocked minority groups from choosing their preferred candidates. In the South, where lines are redrawn every decade to reflect population changes, lawsuits ensued over whether legislative and congressional districts are fair to black people.
In Georgia, these lawsuits yielded an order to redraw Georgia’s 14 congressional districts to create another black-majority district on the west side of metro Atlanta, as well as an order to draw additional black-majority Senate and State House districts to attract.
Some Democrats had hoped the federal court order would result in more gains for their party. But Republicans redrew maps that maintained their 9-5 advantage in congressional districts and 33-23 advantage in Senate districts. Democrats gained just two seats in the state House, reducing Republicans’ majority in that chamber to 100-80.
Raffensperger argues that the case was wrongly decided because the judge failed to determine that the reason for white voters’ behavior was racist. He pointed to the Republican nomination of Herschel Walker, who is black, for the Senate in 2022.
“The evidence is virtually undisputed that when you change the race of the candidate, the majority votes virtually the same,” Petrany said. “If you change the party of the candidate, the voting behavior of the majority changes drastically.”
That brought agreement from Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Donald Trump appointee, who asked: “Isn’t this the best evidence that it is biased and not racist?”
But Sophia Lakin, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Walker’s nomination was an isolated case “that simply does not stand up to the weight of the evidence.”
Petrany argued that much of that evidence is outdated and that Georgia’s segregationist history no longer applies. “The sins of the past cannot forever influence what Georgia does today,” he said.
But at least one of the jurors said what happened in the past remains important.
“That just ignores the history of what has happened in Georgia over the last 200 years,” said Judge Robin Rosenbaum, a judge appointed by Barack Obama.