Florida appeals court reverses ruling on DeSantis’s congressional maps

A state appeals court in Florida reaffirmed Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) congressional maps Friday, reversing a lower court ruling that labeled them unconstitutional.

The appeals court said the lower court misapplied precedent, and that the suit challenging the maps should have been dismissed.

At the center of the legal conflict are the Florida Constitution’s Fair Districts Amendments, passed in 2010, which restrict partisan gerrymandering. 

A 2015 Florida Supreme Court case ruled that state Republicans violated the amendments in their 2010 congressional maps, focusing on districts surrounding Jacksonville, leading the court to force a new set of district boundaries.

DeSantis proposed a new set of maps in January 2022, which again faced legal challenges based on the Fair Districts Amendments. Plaintiffs said the governor and Florida Republicans drew the lines to reduce the voting power of Black voters in Jacksonville by splitting the city between multiple districts.

The lower court threw out these maps in September — citing the 2015 Florida Supreme Court case. But the appeals court decided Friday that the case was not binding precedent and should not have been relied upon, instead leaning on other factors.

The state’s 5th District is at the center of the case. The pre-2020 census district spanned from parts of Tallahassee across the Florida-Georgia border to Jacksonville, while the DeSantis version of the district would instead include a tightly-packed section of parts of Jacksonville and its southeastern suburbs, moving down the coast to St. Augustine.

The old 5th District had a Black population of about 46 percent, while the new district is just 12.8 percent Black — with the remaining Black population split across other districts with significantly fewer Black voters than the previous district.

The lower court ruled in September that the new maps “diminish [the] ability [of a racial minority] to elect representatives of their choice.” But in Friday’s opinion, the appellate court ruled that is not the case.

The appeals court said the lower court “simply relied on the mere existence of the former [5th District] as a Black performing district as a basis for using it as a benchmark,” instead of considering the Black communities of Tallahassee and Jacksonville separately, for the purposes of redistricting.

“There was no evidentiary basis for the conclusion that [the 5th District] afforded a legally cognizable Black community,” Judges Brad Thomas and Adam Tanenbaum wrote in the majority opinion.

The ruling means that all of North Florida’s congressional districts — all of which are held by Republicans — will remain in effect for the 2024 elections unless the case is again overturned by the Florida Supreme Court.

Genesis Robinson, political director for activist group Equal Ground and a plaintiff in the case, denounced the decision Friday.

“Today’s ruling by the First District Court of Appeals sets a dangerous precedent for the erosion of voting rights in Florida,” he said in a statement.

“From the very beginning, Gov. DeSantis has been using the voting rights of Black Floridians as pawns in his game of political ambition. When voters overwhelmingly passed the Fair District Amendments in 2010, this was the very type of political corruption and partisan favoritism they sought to rid from our state,” he continued.

Robinson said plaintiffs expect to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court.