Atlanta

Gov. Kemp signs redistricting bill into law as opponents file lawsuits

By WSBTV.com News Staff
By WSBTV.com News Staff

ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp has signed a new Georgia political map into law in a once-in-a-decade redistricting effort.

Kemp signed the bill Thursday. Opponents immediately filed a court challenge.

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The bill is meant to give Republicans an opportunity to gain a seat in Congress during next year’s elections. The suburban Atlanta 6th District, now held by Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, is turned into a strongly Republican district.

McBath has already announced that she’s jumping to the new 7th District in Gwinnett and Fulton counties, which was made much more Democratic, to mount a primary challenge against fellow Democratic U.S. Rep Carolyn Bourdeaux.

The state Senate map is projected to keep 59%, or 33, of the Senate’s 56 seats in GOP hands. That’s down from 34 right now. The state House map is projected to keep 54% of House seats, or 98 of 180, in Republican hands. That’s down from 103 Republicans now.

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Redistricting is required once every 10 years to ensure equal populations in districts.

Since 2010, Georgia has grown by around a million people, mostly of color. The rapid demographic shift and a new influx of Democratic voters led the state to flip Georgia’s two Senate seats from Republicans to Democrats in 2020.

Redistricting essentially moves Democratic voters out of heavily left-leaning counties and moves in Republican voters in their place.

A federal lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union claims legislative maps take voting power away from people of color, who tend to vote Democrat.

“In the last decade, citizens who are Black drove Georgia’s significant population growth, yet the General Assembly failed to draw district lines that would allow these new voters to elect their preferred leaders,” the ACLU said in a statement.

“In particular, the General Assembly could have drawn at least a half-dozen new Black-majority state Senate or state House districts in the southern and eastern parts of the Atlanta metro region, the Augusta area, and the Southwest Georgia area. Yet the General Assembly failed to do so, diluting the true voting strength of voters who are Black.”

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The Southern Poverty Law Center also issued a statement against the bill Thursday, reading, in part:

“One of the most striking examples of this is the 6th district, where the state legislature has stripped minority voters out of the district and dispersed them among other districts in attempt to unseat one of the 5 Black representatives from Georgia. Now, despite an increase in populations of Black Georgians from 31% of the population to 33%, they will have fewer representatives, not more.”

House speaker David Ralston previously told Channel 2 Action News that he’s confident the maps, which will likely move Georgia’s congressional delegation from an 8-to-6 split to a 9-to-5 GOP advantage, will survive any legal challenge.

“They very carefully followed the law,” Ralston said.

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