Federal Court Upholds 3 State Legislative Districts in Florida

The Florida Capitol in Tallahassee on March 14, 2023. Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times

A federal court on Aug. 6 unanimously upheld three South Florida state House districts, finding the districts were not unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.

The plaintiffs—three progressive groups and several voters—had argued that the Florida Legislature’s creation of four majority-minority Hispanic districts in the southern part of the state violated the U.S. Constitution as a racial gerrymander. Three of the districts at issue were in the Florida House of Representatives, while the remaining district was in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering is the drawing of district boundaries to favor a particular party or constituency.

The progressive groups argued that the districts were drawn based on race, rather than community interests. They took the position that lumping all Hispanic voters together ignored significant differences between groups like Venezuelans and Cubans and that this might weaken the power of more progressive voters in those communities.

Legislative leaders said they drew the majority-Hispanic districts to comply with the state constitution’s non-diminishment requirements. Those provisions say the Legislature may not draw new districts in a way that weakens the ability of racial or language minorities to elect the candidates they prefer. In other words, state lawmakers may not dilute minority voting strength that already exists.

A three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida held in Cubanos Pa’Lante v. Florida House of Representatives that no illegal gerrymander occurred because “race did not predominate in the drawing of the challenged state house districts.”

The court began its opinion by saying the U.S. Constitution forbids in almost all circumstances “the use of race in government decisionmaking,” including making race “the predominant concern when drawing electoral districts.”

The Supreme Court has held that race may be taken into account alongside “traditional race-neutral redistricting criteria like contiguity and maintaining political subdivisions,” but it may not override those criteria, the court said.

The court left intact the three state legislative districts—115, 118, and 119—but held off on making a ruling on Congressional District 26. The congressional district claim will remain on hold pending the outcome of ongoing state litigation over the new congressional map.

The court found that the three state House districts were drawn based on normal, race-neutral mapmaking criteria. The districts follow natural geographic features and current political boundaries, keeping South Florida cities whole instead of splitting them.

The plaintiffs failed to show that race overrode those normal rules, and they never offered a better alternative map that reduced the apparent concentration of voters of a particular race, the court said.

The court is required to give the Legislature the benefit of the doubt, so it cannot hold that race was the main factor in drawing any of the districts. Because race did not predominate, the court is not required to decide whether the districts would pass strict constitutional scrutiny.

The district court also considered the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision that limited the use of race-based redistricting in a legal challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map. The nation’s highest court ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s use of race to form an additional majority-black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The district court said Callais did not alter the legal test used in assessing racial gerrymandering claims. In that two-part test, the plaintiffs must show race was the predominant factor in drawing the district, and if so, whether the use of race was narrowly tailored to advance a compelling governmental interest.

The court did not need to reach the second step because the plaintiffs failed to show that race predominated in the drawing of the three state legislative districts

The district court entered judgment in favor of the Florida House of Representatives on those claims.