Appeals court sides with Arkansas federal judge on restricting Voting Rights Act lawsuits

November 20, 20231:14 pm



A federal appellate court today affirmed a judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit challenging Arkansas’s new maps for state legislative districts, a ruling that could have widespread consequences for voting rights in the U.S.

The case pits the NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel — two “advocacy groups,” as the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals collectively refers to them — against the state of Arkansas’s Board of Apportionment, which is made up of the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state. The board is responsible for redrawing the lines for state Senate and House districts every ten years.

The advocacy groups contended that the 2021 apportionment maps diluted minority voters’ votes through a combination of “packing” (drawing lines that concentrate a cohesive political group into a limited number of districts) and “cracking” (dividing members of a cohesive political group among several districts), thus discriminating against minority voters. They sued under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights legislation meant to keep states from disenfranchising Black and other minority voters.

In February 2022, U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky of Little Rock dismissed the case, but he never reached the underlying merits of the case. Instead, the judge determined that private citizens cannot sue under Section 2 of the VRA. Such a case can only be brought with involvement from the federal Department of Justice, Rudofsky said, despite the fact that individuals and voting-rights groups have long sued to enforce the federal law.

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https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/11/20/appeals-court-sides-with-arkansas-federal-judge-on-restricting-voting-rights-act-lawsuits