5th Circuit: Minority Coalitions Cannot Sue Under VRA in Galveston Case
The nation’s most conservative federal appeals court ruled that a coalition of Black and Latino voters who formed a majority-minority district in Galveston County, Texas cannot bring vote-dilution claims under the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in their lawsuit against the county’s commissioners court map.
Thursday’s ruling from the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down part of a lower court finding that the 2021 map adopted by the commissioners court violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and denies Black and Latino voters an “equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect a candidate of their choice.”
The 5th Circuit sent the case back to the district court to reconsider the intentional discrimination and racial gerrymandering claims.
Five of the court’s six dissenting judges wrote that the majority’s decision “finally dismantled the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in this circuit, leaving four decades of en banc precedent flattened in its wake.”
“Texas has historically discriminated against both Black and Latino voters,” the judges wrote. “And Galveston County is, by all accounts, the embodiment of the conditions which led to (Section 2’s) adoption.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs said Friday they’re “disappointed” by the decision.
“The court told the Black and Latino residents of Galveston, who entered this fight together, that they cannot vote as one community,” Sarah Xiyi Chen, of the Voting Rights Program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement.
Last year, after county officials appealed to the 5th Circuit, a three-judge panel of Republican-appointed judges affirmed the lower court ruling. In that same order, however, the panel requested that the entire 5th Circuit rehear the case.
Specifically, the panel held that the entire court should reconsider precedent that allows for “minority-coalition” vote-dilution claims under the VRA.
“The district court appropriately applied precedent when it permitted the black and Hispanic populations of Galveston County to be aggregated for purposes of assessing compliance with Section 2,” the court wrote in its order. “But the members of this panel agree that this court’s precedent permitting aggregation should be overturned. We therefore call for this case to be reheard en banc.”
During oral argument in May, the panel seemed divided on the question of whether minority-coalitions can bring claims under VRA — or whether VRA protections only cover a single protected class, according to the Texas Tribune.
Judge Edith Brown Clement, a George H.W. Bush appointee, seemed to assert that allowing minority-coalitions to bring vote-dilution claims under VRA would extend U.S. Supreme Court precedent set by Thornburg v. Gingles, a 1986 ruling that established what’s known as the Gingles factors, a test that courts use when evaluating the creation of majority-minority districts.
“If we allow coalitions, there will be more claims, will there not?” Clements asked, the Tribune reported.
In its defense of the map, the county said the plaintiffs can’t prove that the redistricting process was performed because of race, implying in court documents that there were other factors at play, such as balancing the population and keeping commissioners’ homes within their precincts.
A group of voters sued over the map in 2022, and a federal judge struck the map down in 2023.