ABKF, on behalf of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to abandon the “Gingles test” the Court has long used to adjudicate “vote-dilution” claims under the Voting Rights Act. Under Gingles, courts must address whether legislative districts impermissibly “dilute” the political power of minority voters. But as the brief explains, “to decide whether an electoral system has made it harder for minority voters to elect the candidates they prefer, a court must have an idea in mind of how hard it ‘should’ be for minority voters to elect their preferred candidates under an acceptable system.” That inquiry inevitably devolves into questions of political theory and fairness that courts are ill-suited to answer.

From the brief:

For nearly four decades, Gingles has forced courts to make inherently political judgments about racial representation without clear legal standards.  By abandoning Gingles—either by adopting an alternative test or ending race-based districting altogether—the Court can extricate federal courts from the sordid and politically fraught process of overseeing race-based voting districts.  Race-based districting undermines public confidence in our democratic institutions and the federal judiciary.  To borrow a phrase, the Court “should get out of this area, where” it has “no right to be, and where” it does “neither” itself “nor the country any good by remaining.”  Planned Parenthood of Se. Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 1002 (1992) (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part).

Ben Flowers and Shams Hirji represent RITE in this matter.