In June 2015, the Supreme Court announced that it would review a challenge to the redistricting map drawn by Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission. The plaintiffs in the case, a group of Arizona voters, argued that the Commission had not distributed Arizona residents evenly among the State Legislative districts: it put too many people in some Republican districts, while it put too few in some Democratic districts.
Today, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, unanimously upheld the Arizona maps.
In his opinion for the Court, Breyer explained that the Constitution requires states to try to distribute residents evenly among legislative districts, but it “does not demand mathematical perfection.” In particular, states can draw districts with populations that aren’t perfectly equal if there is a good reason to do so – for example, to draw districts that are compact or to ensure that a city or county is not split up. And the fact that districts aren’t perfectly equal, standing alone, does not mean that a redistricting map violates the Constitution, Breyer explained, if the largest deviation from perfect equality is less than ten percent.
The Court also rejected out of hand the suggestion that, because Arizona is no longer required to obtain approval of its redistricting maps from the Federal Department of Justice, a desire to comply with the Voting Rights Act could not have been a good reason to draw districts with unequal populations. The Court didn’t issue its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, striking down the formula used to determine which state and local governments need to get preapproval from the Justice Department, until 2013, while the commission created the redistricting plan at issue in this case in 2010. And so even if Arizona doesn’t need to get preapproval now, the Court stressed, it did in 2010 – which is all that matters for this case.
Both the brevity of today’s opinion and the text itself seem to suggest that the decision is a relatively narrow one. When a State or Local Government draws a redistricting map that does not distribute the population completely evenly, but still keeps the deviations from perfect equality under ten percent, the map can still survive unless the challengers can show that something more nefarious was going on. Exactly how nefarious that conduct must be is an open question, but the Court’s opinion strongly indicates that challenges will succeed “only rarely, in unusual cases”, a high bar indeed.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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