Voting Rights Case Law Pt. 1

Rucho v. Common Cause (2019)

1. Background: A three-judge district court struck down North Carolina's 2016 congressional map, ruling that the plaintiffs had standing to challenge the map and that the map was the product of partisan gerrymandering. The district court then enjoined the state from using the map after November 2018. North Carolina Republicans, led by Robert Rucho, head of the senate redistricting committee, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. 2. Court declared that Partisan gerrymandering claims are not justiciable because they present a political question beyond the reach of the federal courts. 3. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the 5-4 majority opinion. Federal courts are charged with resolving cases and controversies of a judicial nature. In contrast, questions of a political nature are "nonjusticiable," and the courts cannot resolve such questions. Partisan gerrymandering has existed since prior to the independence of the United States, and, aware of this occurrence, the Framers chose to empower state legislatures, "expressly checked and balanced by the Federal Congress" to handle these matters. While federal courts can resolve "a variety of questions surrounding districting," including racial gerrymandering, it is beyond their power to decide the central question: when has political gerrymandering gone too far. In the absence of any "limited and precise standard" for evaluating partisan gerrymandering, federal courts cannot resolve such issues. 4. Justice Elena Kagan filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor joined. Justice Kagan criticized the Court for sidestepping a critical question involving the violation of "the most fundamental of . . . constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives." Justice Kagan argued that by not intervening in the political gerrymanders, the Court effectively "encourage[s] a politics of polarization and dysfunction" that "may irreparably damage our system of government." She argued that the standards adopted in lower courts across the country do meet the contours of the "limited and precise standard" the majority demanded yet purported not to find.

Gomillion v. Lightfoot 1960

1. Background: An act of the Alabama legislature re-drew the electoral district boundaries of Tuskegee. The intention was to exclude essentially all blacks from the city limits of Tuskegee and place them in a district where no whites lived. 2. Electoral district boundaries drawn only to disenfranchise blacks violate the Fifteenth Amendment. 3. Court held racial gerrymandering-ordinance unconstitutional

Oregon v. Mitchell 1970

1. Background: In 1970, Congress passed Voting Right Act Amendments that lowered the voting age in state and federal elections from 21 to 18, forbade the use of literacy tests at the polls, and forbade states from disqualifying voters in presidential and vice presidential elections based on state residency requirements. The states of Oregon, Arizona, Idaho, and Texas sued, and argued that these Amendments infringe on rights the Constitution reserves for the states. 2. The Court held that Congress had the power to enact the amendments that changed the voting age for federal elections, abolish literary tests at the polling station, and abolish state residency requirements for presidential and vice presidential election. However, the Court held that lowering the voting age for state and local election was beyond Congressional purview. 3. The Court held that the Framers intended for Article I Section 4 of the Constitution and the Necessary and Proper Clause to grant the States the power to make the laws that govern elections and for Congress to have the power to alter the laws if necessary. The Court also held that the legislative history surrounding the enactment and enforcement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments support the role that Congress plays in preventing racial discrimination in the electorate without denying the states their rights.

Reynolds v. Sims 1964

1. Background: Lines dividing electoral districts had resulted in dramatic population discrepancies among the districts. The district in Jefferson County, which is near Birmingham, contained 41 times as many eligible voters as those in another district of the state. 2. Court Held 14th amendment requires state legislative districts reflect fair "one person, one vote" rule 3. Equal Protection Clause demanded "no less than substantially equal state legislative representation for all citizens...." Noting that the right to direct representation was "a bedrock of our political system," the Court held that both houses of bicameral state legislatures had to be apportioned on a population basis

Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute 2018

1. Background: Ohio currently employs a process that clears the state's voter rolls of individuals who have died or relocated. Under this process, voters who have not voted for two years are sent notices to confirm their registration. If the state receives no response and these individuals do not vote over the next four years, they are ultimately removed from the rolls. 2. Ohio's list-maintenance process does not violate any provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) or the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court found that Ohio's procedure of requiring (1) a failure to vote for two years, (2) a failure to return a notice card, and (3) a failure to vote for four additional years was sufficiently rigorous under NVRA and its amended versions. 3. Justice Sotomayor wrote a separate dissenting opinion arguing that the majority's decision ignores the driving purpose behind the NVRA—to address voter suppression laws—and pointing to statistics from amicus briefs showing that the law has a disproportionate effect of unregistering substantially more African American voters as compared to suburban white voters.

Gil v. Whitford 2018

1. Background: Republican leadership developed a voting district map that its drafters calculated would allow Republicans to maintain a majority under any likely voting scenario. A federal court upheld the plan as not violating the "one person one vote" principle nor violating the Equal Protection Clause. Plaintiffs in this case challenge the plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. At issue is whether the plan systematically dilutes the voting strength of Democratic voters statewide. 2. Case essentially upheld partisan gerrymandering. 3. In a unanimous decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court sidestepped (for now) all of the key issues regarding partisan gerrymandering, resolving the case instead on the technical issue of judicial standing. 4. For a plaintiff to bring a case in federal court, she must have Article III standing, which requires showing three elements, one of which is "injury in fact." To show injury in fact, a plaintiff must show that she has suffered "invasion of a legally protected interest" that is "concrete and particularized." In this case, the Court found that the plaintiffs alleged but did not prove individual harms, providing evidence instead only of statewide harms of alleged partisan gerrymandering. The Court thus vacated the judgment of the district court and remanded for further proceedings.

Abbott v. Perez 2018

1. Background: The plaintiffs alleged racial gerrymandering in violation of § 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) as well as the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. At that time Texas was bound by the preclearance requirements under § 5 of the VRA, and therefore the State simultaneously filed an action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ("D.C. District Court") seeking preclearance of the redistricting plans. 2. Upheld racial Gerrymandering in all but 1 district in Texas 3. Issue of whether the supreme court could even hear the case, Justice Alito wrote it had jurisdiction to review the orders in this case under 28 U.S.C. § 1253, because they qualified as interlocutory injunction orders. 4. Sotomayor rejected the Majority's assertion that the Court had jurisdiction to hear the case, disagreeing with its conclusion that the lower court's orders constituted an injunction. She also disagreed with the Majority's conclusion that the Texas District Court had erred with regard to the legal test for discriminatory intent. Sotomayor contended that the lower court had engaged in a careful consideration of the legislature's intent rather than presuming invidious intent, and correctly found that the legislature intended to discriminate.

Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections 1966

1. Background: Virginia resident Annie Harper could not pay the state-imposed poll tax of $1.50. She filed suit, alleging the poll tax deprived indigent Virginia residents of their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The federal district court dismissed her claim, based in part on a 1937 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that had ruled poll taxes to be within the powers of the states. 2. In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice William Douglas, the Court held the poll tax violated the Equal Protection Clause. Overruling its own precedent in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), the majority reasoned that the eligibility to vote has no rational connection to the wealth of an individual. Thus, the poll tax could not meet the heightened standard of review applied to restrictions on voting, which is a fundamental right under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Shelby County v Holder (2013)

1. Case regarding the constitutionality of two provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Section 5, which requires certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices; and Section 4(b), which contains the coverage formula that determines which jurisdictions are subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting. 2. The Court held that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act imposes current burdens that are no longer responsive to the current conditions in the voting districts in question. Although the constraints this section places on specific states made sense in the 1960s and 1970s, they do not any longer and now represent an unconstitutional violation of the power to regulate elections that the Constitution reserves for the states. The Court also held that the formula for determining whether changes to a state's voting procedure should be federally reviewed is now outdated

Bush v. Gore 2000

1. The court held that manual recounts of presidential ballots in the Nov. 2000 election could not proceed because inconsistent evaluation standards in different counties violated the equal protection clause. 2. Noting that the Equal Protection clause guarantees individuals that their ballots cannot be devalued by "later arbitrary and disparate treatment," the per curiam opinion held 7-2 that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional. Even if the recount was fair in theory, it was unfair in practice. 3. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Florida is worth 25 points in the electoral college. Bush beat Gore 271 to 266 in the electoral college(270 points are needed to win the presidency)

Bonus: Katzenbach v. Morgan 1966

Upheld giving the right to vote to Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans in New York. It was decided together with a companion case in Cardona v. Power