TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A state appeals court Friday upheld a congressional redistricting plan that Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through the Legislature, rejecting arguments that it unconstitutionally diminished the rights of Black voters to elect a candidate of their choice.
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In a main opinion and three concurring opinions, the 1st District Court of Appeal by an 8-2 margin rejected a Leon County circuit judge’s ruling that the redistricting plan violated a 2010 state constitutional amendment that set standards for redistricting.
The case, which is expected to go to the Florida Supreme Court, centers on an overhaul of North Florida’s Congressional District 5, which in the past elected Black Democrat Al Lawson.
Voting-rights groups and other plaintiffs argue that the overhaul violated part of the constitutional amendment, known as the Fair Districts Amendment, that barred drawing districts that would “diminish” the ability of minorities to “elect representatives of their choice.”
Read: Florida redistricting fight set to be heard by Federal three-judge panel
The overhaul led to white Republicans getting elected in all North Florida congressional districts in the 2022 elections.
While Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh sided with the plaintiffs in September, the appeals court’s main opinion Friday focused, in part, on the sprawling shape of the district that elected Lawson.
That district stretched from Jacksonville to Gadsden County, west of Tallahassee, as it linked communities with significant Black populations. The shape of the former District 5 was the result of a 2015 Florida Supreme Court decision.
Friday’s main opinion said the protection offered by what is known as the “non-diminishment” clause of the Florida Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act “is of the voting power of ‘a politically cohesive, geographically insular minority group.’”
It said linking voters across a large stretch of North Florida did not meet such a definition of cohesiveness.
Read: Florida judge rules congressional redistricting plan is unconstitutional
“At its heart, the plaintiffs’ claim is based on a false premise … that minority voters living hundreds of miles apart in totally different communities, not joined in any reasonably configured geographically area, are entitled to proportional representation merely because they were once included together in former CD-5 (Congressional District 5) by court order for three election cycles,” the main opinion written by Judges Adam Tanenbaum and Brad Thomas said.
The opinion added, “Without common interests and a shared history and socioeconomic experience, it is not a community that can give rise to a cognizable right protected by the FDA (Fair Districts Amendment).
In other words, it is the community that must have the power, not a district manufactured for the sole purpose of creating voting power.”
Tanenbaum and Thomas were joined in the main opinion by Judges Clay Roberts, Lori Rowe, Thomas Winokur, M. Kimmerly Thomas and Robert Long.
Chief Judge Timothy Osterhaus, Winokur and Long wrote concurring opinions. Judges Joseph Lewis, Stephanie Ray and Rachel Nordby were recused.
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