Redistricting
Republicans in Florida racially gerrymandered two key state senate districts to disenfranchise Black voters and skew results in the Tampa Bay area, a panel of judges has heard.
In one district, they took a small chunk of St Petersburg heavy with minority voters and added it to an area of Tampa in a different county, and across a 10-mile waterway, leaving the remainder of its electorate “artificially white”, the court was told.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, representing voters at a four-day trial in Tampa last week, said the state’s defense that the waters of Tampa Bay made the new district contiguous was ridiculous, pointing out in the lawsuit that “manatees don’t vote”.
“These are cities on opposite sides of the bay and there’s no way to go directly between them,” Caroline McNamara, an ACLU staff attorney, said.
“You either have to go across 10 miles of open ocean at the mouth of Tampa Bay, or you have to cut through other districts in the area through the north end.”
The case has direct parallels in previous moves by Republican officials in Florida to manipulate voting districts to their advantage by undercutting Black voting power.
A panel of three federal judges is now weighing whether a Tampa Bay state Senate district created in 2022 was the result of illegal racial gerrymandering.
A four-day trial resulting from a lawsuit over the district concluded on Thursday afternoon and judges must decide whether the constitutional rights of voters in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties were violated when the Legislature created the Senate district in 2022 that crossed from St. Petersburg over the water to Hillsborough County.
Florida was sued by three voters who are represented by the ACLU of Florida and the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law. The plaintiffs allege that the Legislature’s plan to connect Black populations from parts of Hillsborough and Pinellas counties violated their equal-protection rights by unjustifiably concentrating Black voters into District 16 by removing them from nearby District 18, reducing their influence there.
The defendants, Senate President Ben Albritton and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, have denied that claim, saying that the maps were lawfully drawn up and previously approved as legally sound by the Florida Supreme Court.
TAMPA, Fla. — A federal trial is underway in Tampa this week as a panel of three judges hears arguments in a lawsuit challenging a Tampa Bay-area Senate district, alleging the district map was racially gerrymandered in violation of constitutional rights.
The suit was filed by the ACLU of Florida and several voters from the Tampa Bay area. Plaintiffs claim the 2022-adopted district map improperly packs Black voters into District 16, diluting their electoral influence, particularly in Pinellas County.
District 16, currently represented by Democratic State Sen. Darryl Rouson, stretches across Tampa Bay, linking the southern portion of St. Petersburg with parts of Tampa and Hillsborough County.
“We’re not asking for special treatment,” St. Petersburg resident and plaintiff Meiko Seymour said in an interview with 10 Tampa Bay. “We’re asking for fair representation.”
Seymour and others argue that crossing the bay to group voters of color into a single district limits their influence in their direct neighborhood.
“When lines are drawn in a way to pack Black voters into one district, it actually weakens our influence across the rest of the city,” Seymour said. “It keeps us from having an actual seat at the table where decisions are being made that impact our schools, our streets and our future.”
A Florida law that has pushed public schools to remove thousands of books, including literary classics, from their shelves could get even more restrictive soon, as Republican lawmakers move to close a “loophole” they say still allows volumes depicting nudity or sexual conduct to remain on campuses.
New bills backed by GOP legislators would mean school districts could no longer consider a book’s artistic, literary, political or scientific value when deciding whether to keep it. Instead, any book that “describes sexual conduct” could face removal.
Already, critics argue the 2023 law is unconstitutional — a pending federal lawsuit says it violates the First Amendment — and overly broad and vague. Some worried educators have removed children’s picture books, such as “No David!” by David Shannon, showing cartoonish bare bottoms out of fear they depict the prohibited “sexual conduct.” Classics such as Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” also have been pulled.
But Republicans say there are still inappropriate and “pornographic” books in school libraries and classrooms, and they argue the law needs to be strengthened.
Federal Judges are allowing a legal challenge to South Florida’s congressional and Florida House districts to move forward.
But the three-Judge panel also said plaintiffs were only allowed to continue a challenge against eight of 10 districts originally called out in federal complaints.
The lawsuit ironically alleges the same motivations behind the cartography that Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed motivated him to veto a congressional map (P 0109) approved by the Legislature before his office submitted the map, which has been in place since 2022.
The lawsuit said Florida’s 26th, 27th and 28th Congressional Districts were all drawn motivated primarily by race. Notably, all three districts are currently represented by Republican Cuban Americans: U.S. Reps. Mario Díaz-Balartof Hialeah, María Elvira Salazar of Coral Gables and Carlos Giménez of Miami-Dade, respectively.
The courts only will allow a legal challenge to CD 26, Díaz-Balart’s district. That notably spans from Immokalee in Collier County to Hialeah and Miami Beach in north Miami-Dade County.
MIAMI – The City of Miami is fighting back against a judge’s ruling that said commissioners drew a voting map based on race and ethnicity.
In 2022, voting rights activists sued Miami over the new map.
Last month, a judge agreed and invalidated the boundaries of the city’s five districts calling the map unconstitutional. CBS News Miami partner The Miami Herald cited comments from the commissioners themselves in which they said the map was drawn to ensure the commission had three Hispanic, one white, and one Black commissioner.
The city was set to approve a new map as part of a settlement with minor changes and a payout of one point six million dollars in legal fees to the voting rights activists but they pushed off the decision for another two weeks. The settlement map would be in effect for next year’s local election.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge in Florida yesterday struck down Miami’s city commission districts for being unconstitutional racial gerrymanders and ordered the implementation of a new map for future elections.
The ruling stemmed from a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by local organizations and individual residents alleging that the districts for Miami’s five-member city commission were “drawn along racial lines for the predominant purpose of maintaining racially segregated districts.” As the city’s governing body, the commission has the power to pass local laws, adopt regulations and more.