Florida Voters Challenge Discriminatory Map With Support of National Redistricting Foundation

For Immediate Release
April 22, 2022 

Contact
Jena Doyle
doyle@redistrictingfoundation.org 

Florida Voters Challenge Discriminatory Map With Support of National Redistricting Foundation 

Washington, D.C. – A group of individual voter-plaintiffs and the community-based organizations Black Voters Matter, Equal Ground, the League of Women Voters of Florida, and Florida Rising, supported by the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF), are challenging Florida’s recently enacted congressional map for violating Article III, § 20 of the Florida Constitution, commonly known as the Fair Districts Amendment. Plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that the congressional plan and/or individual districts in the congressional plan violate the Fair Districts Amendment and order the adoption of a new congressional plan that complies with the Constitution. The lawsuit, Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute v. Lee, was filed in the Circuit Court of Leon County. 

“Republicans across the country tried - and completely failed - to gerrymander their way to a congressional majority. In response to this defeat, DeSantis has bullied the legislature into enacting a map that does not allow for a fair electoral contest, and instead draws Republicans an illegitimate and illegal partisan advantage that they have not earned from the voters. And it does so at the expense of black voters in Florida who are being denied fair representation in Congress,” said Eric H. Holder, Jr., the 82nd Attorney General of the United States.

Throughout the redistricting process, Governor DeSantis repeatedly threatened to veto any map that the Florida legislature passed if it did not meet his demands. He followed through on that threat and vetoed the congressional map initially passed by both chambers of the legislature. Governor DeSantis then proposed his own map (“the DeSantis Plan”), which received an overwhelming amount of public testimony against, and was then, in turn, passed by the legislature during a special session that began on April 19 and lasted only three days.

Among other deficiencies, the DeSantis Plan violates the Fair Districts Amendment by purposefully diminishing minority voting strength and diminishing the ability of Black voters to elect representatives of their choice, specifically in the Black opportunity district CD-05 which was created by the Florida Supreme Court following a challenge to the previous decade’s gerrymander, and by intentionally favoring the Republican Party and disfavoring the Democratic Party. It also draws CD-14 across Tampa Bay, packing Democratic voters and connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa by nothing but water, an action that was ruled legally impermissible during the last redistricting cycle.

In 2020, President Biden won 47.9% of the vote statewide in Florida, but he would win just over a quarter of the congressional seats because of the map’s extreme gerrymander.

The complaint can be found here. 

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