By Mary Green
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCSC) - A case that will decide which candidates South Carolinians see on their ballots next year now rests with the state’s highest court.
It’s the latest challenge stemming from South Carolina’s last redistricting cycle, which happens every 10 years, following the US Census.
Last year, the US Supreme Court sided with the state’s Republican leaders in a challenge over whether South Carolina’s Congressional map was racially gerrymandered.
The question now before the state Supreme Court is whether this same map, upheld by the US Supreme Court, was politically gerrymandered in violation of South Carolina’s constitution and should be invalidated.
“Instead of providing every qualified elector with an equal right to elect officers, respondents have instead carefully engineered the Congressional redistricting plan to dilute the influence of Democratic voters and to entrench for themselves an artificial political advantage in that district,” Allen Chaney, an attorney with the ACLU who was representing the League of Women Voters of South Carolina in court Tuesday, said.
The League of Women Voters of South Carolina is challenging the latest Congressional map, which determines who represents every South Carolinian across the state’s seven districts in the US House of Representatives.
State lawmakers have testified the map’s lines, particularly between the state’s First Congressional District, now held by Republican Nancy Mace, and the Sixth Congressional District, held by Democrat Jim Clyburn, were drawn in a way to retain Republicans’ control over the coastal First District. Mace’s district had previously been much closer to a swing district.
With it, none of South Carolina’s seven districts are considered tossups that a candidate from either party could win, with six solidly red and Clyburn’s solidly blue.
The League of Women Voters claims that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution’s guarantee of an “equal right to elect officers,” and it is asking the Supreme Court to force the General Assembly to redraw the map — a request to which justices seemed reluctant to take up.
But attorneys for South Carolina’s Republican leaders claimed this partisan gerrymandering is legal, with the state constitution never explicitly forbidding it. They pointed to a 2019 ruling from the US Supreme Court that found partisan gerrymandering questions were outside the scope of federal courts.
There is no timeline for justices to rule in this case.
Read the full article the link above.
