Why Black Voters Want To Change Mississippi’s 1987 Supreme Court Map

Mississippi Supreme Court. Credit: Mississippi judiciary website.

A group of voters are challenging Mississippi’s decades-old electoral map for the state Supreme Court, arguing the current districts dilute the voting strength of Black Mississippians in a state where they comprise 40% of the population.

In a federal redistricting case set for trial next week, plaintiffs are suing Gov. Tate Reeves and Secretary of State Michael Watson, both Republicans, along with the state Board of Election Commissioners and state Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R), over alleged violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

At issue are Mississippi’s three at-large voting districts used to elect justices to the Mississippi Supreme Court. The complaint says the state has used the same districts since 1987, and that the Legislature drew those districts over the objections of Black lawmakers. 

One district — District 1 — could be redrawn as a majority-Black district, plaintiffs argue, which would allow the state to keep its court map mostly intact, “while also ensuring that those elections comply with federal law.”

The complaint notes the court had never had a Black justice until 1985, when Reuben V. Anderson joined the bench. Since then, the lawsuit says, “there has been just one Black Justice at a time, always in the “District 1, Place 2 seat, and always first appointed by the Governor.” And, the court has only had four Black justices “in the 100 years that Mississippi has elected its Supreme Court by popular vote,” the complaint says.

The state argues in part that the same district the plaintiffs want redrawn has elected both Black and white justices. “It is hard to imagine finding a more equal district anywhere in the country,” defendants said in a post-trial brief.

Mississippi’s high court currently has one Black justice: Presiding Justice Leslie King, representing District 1, Place 2. 

“The reason for this persistent underrepresentation is that Mississippi employs Supreme Court district boundaries that dilute the voting strength of Black Mississippians in Supreme Court elections,” the plaintiffs said.

Much of the plaintiffs’ argument centers on Thornburg v. Gingles, a 1986 ruling that established what’s known as the Gingles factors, a test that courts have used for decades to evaluate Section 2 claims. The Gingles test requires the creation of a majority-minority district only when three preconditions are met.

One of the conditions is that a majority group must vote sufficiently as a bloc to enable it to usually defeat the minority group’s preferred candidate. The plaintiffs argue that white support for Black-preferred candidates “is minimal, and that Black-preferred candidates will typically be defeated by White bloc voting outside of Black majority districts.”

Citing a recent example, the plaintiffs detailed a 2020 race in which a Black Court of Appeals judge lost a District 1 race despite maintaining roughly 48% of the vote. “The Black voting age percentage of the population in District 1 was around 49%,” the complaint said.

Apart from Gingles, a key question defendants posed in the lawsuit is whether a federal district court has the legal authority to “revise the boundaries of judicial districts” and not just legislative districts. They argue that judges are different from legislative representatives.

“Legislative representatives are supposed to be responsive to the people who elect them, and Gingles explains that the courts considering (Section 2) actions can take responsiveness into account,” the defendants say. “The job of judges, however, is to administer the law impartially, not to be responsive to the views and desires of the voters who elect them.”

Read more about the lawsuit here.

Read more about the case here.