UPDATE: On May 23, 2024 The Supreme Court reversed the judgement of the District Court and remanded the case in part for further proceedings finding in favor of the Defendants.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. The case challenged South Carolina Congressional District 1 as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.  

ELC is represented Professors Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos and Jowei Chen in support of Appellees. In their brief, submitted to the Supreme Court on August 18, 2023, amici describe the uses of computational redistricting in racial gerrymandering cases. They argue that computational redistricting offers useful—but not essential—circumstantial evidence of legislative intent, the key issue in racial gerrymandering litigation. When the demographics of a challenged district diverge significantly from those of corresponding districts created by computer algorithms using nonracial criteria, this evidence indicates that race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature’s design. Otherwise, if not for a predominant racial purpose, the demographics of the challenged district should be similar to those of the computer-generated maps created with nonracial criteria.

The reasons for rejecting computational redistricting evidence in racial vote dilution cases simply do not apply in the racial gerrymandering context because racial gerrymandering claims turn on legislative intent and don’t rely on race-conscious baselines. Amici also recommend five best practices for conducting computational redistricting in the racial gerrymandering context. The brief encourages the Court to acknowledge the probative value of computational redistricting in the racial gerrymandering context, especially when it is implemented using best practices. 

BACKGROUND

After the Republican-majority South Carolina Congressional District 1 elected a Democratic representative in 2018, the state legislature “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district when it began reapportioning in 2020. The 2020 census data showed that District 1 was overpopulated by about 88,000 residents. The map passed in 2022 by the Republican-majority General Assembly rectified this malapportionment by moving 53,000 residents from the underpopulated District 6 into District 1 and moving 140,000 residents from District 1 into District 6.  

Plaintiffs, the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and Taiwan Scott, challenged District 1 as racially gerrymandered in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. After an eight-day trial including computational redistricting evidence, the three-judge panel found that race was the predominant motivating factor in the General Assembly’s configuration of District 1. It held that moving 30,000 African American residents from District 1 to meet the target African American population of 17% required for the desired partisan lean in the district constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The court therefore permanently enjoined elections under Congressional District 1 until it approved a constitutionally valid apportionment plan.  

Defendants appealed the judgment directly to the Supreme Court, invoking the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction. They argue that the district court erred by failing to disentangle race from politics and misapplied the predominance standard. The appellees defended the lower court’s judgment, asserting that its findings of fact were not clearly erroneous and it correctly applied the Court’s racial gerrymandering precedents. ELC, representing Professors Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos and Jowei Chen, filed an amicus brief in support of Appellees, describing how computational redistricting can be properly used to establish evidence of legislative intent in racial gerrymandering claims.  

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