Hawaiʻi Attorney General Lopez urges US Supreme Court to protect minority voting rights

Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez called on the US Supreme Court today to reaffirm that states should be given the first opportunity to redraw voting district lines in response to likely violations of the Voting Rights Act.

Lopez urged the high court in an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief filed in Louisiana v. Callais. A coalition of 20 attorneys general is supporting the state of Louisiana and a group of Louisiana voters seeking to uphold a congressional map that includes two majority-Black districts.

In 2022, a federal court in the Middle District of Louisiana found that the state’s congressional map likely diluted the votes of Black residents and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

In response, to comply with the act, the Louisiana Legislature enacted a new map in 2024 that added a second majority-Black district. Later, a different group of self-identified “non-African American voters” sued the state in the Western District of Louisiana, arguing that the 2024 remedial map with a second majority-Black district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Despite binding Supreme Court precedent allowing states to redistrict when there is a “good reason” to believe they must do so to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana barred the state from using the 2024 VRA-compliant map, trapping Louisiana between competing court orders and undermining the state’s ability to craft legislative districts that comply with federal voting rights law. The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Western District of Louisiana’s constitutional ruling was correct.

“The Voting Rights Act gives every state the responsibility to draw fair and representative congressional districts,” said Hawaiʻi Deputy Solicitor General Thomas Hughes. “Louisiana followed the law, and US Supreme Court precedent when it created a second majority-Black district in the state for the first time in decades. The Court should reject this challenge to Louisiana’s new map, as well as any efforts to further weaken the effectiveness of the VRA.”

In their brief, the state attorneys general argue that in assigning elected state legislatures the primary role in redistricting, the Constitution gives them ample “breathing room” to enact legislative maps that remedy likely Voting Rights Act violations. The brief explains that the finding by a federal court that Louisiana’s existing map likely violated the act provided the state with a good reason to believe that its addition of a second majority-Black district was required to comply with the federal voting rights statute and thus did not violate Constitution.

The brief also urges the Court to reject the arguments in an amicus brief filed by Alabama and 12 other states to toss out years of settled voting rights precedent interpreting Section 2 of the VRA. Not only would it be inappropriate to address Alabama’s arguments in this case, but accepting those arguments would undermine states’ decades-long reliance on the Supreme Court’s settled interpretation of Section 2.

Attorney General Lopez is joined in filing this brief by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

A copy of the brief can be found here.