The legislation would raise the state’s standards for how minority voters are represented after the Supreme Court issued a ruling against unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
In the Pennsylvania State House, Democrats are planning to propose legislation that would set standards for how minority voters are represented in the Commonwealth.
The proposal comes in response to the Supreme Court ruling against unconstitutional racial gerrymanders last week in Louisiana v. Callais. The ruling fundamentally changed how the Voting Rights Act is interpreted in the United States.
In the case, Louisiana Republicans contested a lower court decision that had ordered a re-draw of the state’s Congressional map. The lower court decision had found that Louisiana violated the racial representation guarantee in the Voting Rights Act.
The state made an appeal, arguing that the order would have forced it to adopt a new map with an additional majority-Black district, causing a racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of that argument.
Following the ruling, Republicans in several states moved to redraw congressional maps that had districts drawn using race.
Representative Napoleon Nelson, a Democrat representing Montgomery County in the state House, issued a memo saying that he would soon be filing legislation that “would establish stronger protections in Pennsylvania law to safeguard fair representation and equal access to the ballot box.”
He wrote that the bill “will serve as a critical safeguard against the Supreme Court’s decisions to weaken the Voting Rights Act and will help to protect voting rights in Pennsylvania for years to come.”
Nelson chairs the Legislative Black Caucus.
In the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, he wrote that the Louisiana map was an unconstitutional gerrymander given that “no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race” to create the additional majority-Black district.
Nelson wrote in his bill memo that this interpretation means that “plaintiffs must demonstrate that a legislative map was made with an intent to dilute a minority group’s voting power for that map to be considered a racial gerrymander, a significant increase in the burden required to prove such discrimination.”
Additional states are expected to join the race to redistrict following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.
