A federal lawsuit out of Illinois tests the state’s version of the Voting Rights Act, as it explicitly permits creation of crossover districts to siphon in minority groups. It’s the first since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, ruling that Louisiana’s second majority-Black district is unconstitutional.
Jeanne Ives, a former state representative from suburban Chicago, filed the lawsuit with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm, to challenge the state’s law. She told Straight Arrow on Friday that it’s intended to kill the state’s voting law on using race as a factor in redrawing legislative boundaries. The lawsuit, she said, isn’t to test the state’s 2021 boundaries, but could affect future redistricting efforts.
“I expect the state should back away from their race based, gerrymandering of legislative maps,” Ives said.
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The law, however, instructs legislators to create crossover or influence districts, according to the General Assembly. Those districts are composed of racial or language minorities who are not the majority, but have the potential to elect a representative of their choosing with assistance from the majority, by binding together to form a coalition or through influence.
“Nothing in this Act shall be construed, applied, or implemented in a way that imposes any requirement or obligation that conflicts with the United States Constitution, any federal law regarding redistricting Legislative Districts or Representative Districts, including but not limited to the federal Voting Rights Act, or the Illinois Constitution,” according to the law.
The General Assembly sought to pass a constitutional amendment that explicitly directed lawmakers to consider race, but dropped it after the Louisiana v. Callais U.S. Supreme Court decision, according to Capitol News Illinois.
Ives noted filing the lawsuit in U.S. District Court and not in Illinois as the state’s supreme court is “bought and paid for by the Democrats, including JB Pritzker.” Five justices in the state’s high court are Democrats, while two are Republicans.
She seeks to bar race from consideration in future maps.
Pritzker’s office didn’t immediately respond to Straight Arrow’s request for comment.
John Kincaid, president of the Center for the Study of Federalism, told Straight Arrow Friday that the northern half of the nation could see more lawsuits, as they have Black or minority-majority districts. Along with Illinois, he said states like New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania could be sued. He added that northern states have smaller concentrations of minorities compared to the South.
“I think the Supreme Court decision is saying you can no longer enforce this because it violates the 15th Amendment and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment,” Kincaid said. “It would be hard to find grounds on which states could override that.”
Voting rights across the nation
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Former President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to bar racial discrimination in voting, effectively securing minorities’ right to vote.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 10 states have their own versions of the voting rights that codify protections from the federal legislation. Those states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.
California became the first state to pass such legislation in 2002, which forbade racial vote dilutions.
John Cusick, Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Straight Arrow on Thursday that his group encourages states to pass their versions of the federal act to shield themselves from a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.
“While we think and will continue to pursue these avenues and think they’re incredibly important,” he said, “we also have to be mindful of the challenges as part of, again, this larger project to try to extinguish the full protections of, and the full promise of, a multiracial democracy.”
Challenges in other states
The challenge in Illinois isn’t likely to be the only one, as Kincaid said the Callais decision is the rare instance of the Supreme Court stepping in with redistricting questions.
The court first intervened in the 1960s, which helped birth the Voting Rights Act as it related to minority representation. But has since kept its distance to allow states and state courts to decide on the maps.
“The court has long kind of wanted to extricate itself from this issue, and that’s why it’s not getting into partisan gerrymandering,” Kincaid said.
But he suspected a new legal issue to play out in states with high Indigenous populations who are federally permitted to tribal sovereignty. That includes Alaska, Hawaii and Arizona.
“There’s kind of some different legal issues here, since tribal groups, native peoples, or domestic dependent nations, there’s some different legal principles that apply in their case,” he said.
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