ATLANTA — A series of lawsuits have been filed against the state of Georgia challenging the state’s new congressional and legislative maps.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Georgia GOP’s redistricting plan into law Thursday a month after the Georgia legislature passed the bill.
Almost immediately, several organizations including the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center came out with statements slamming the bill. The suit being filed by the ACLU claims legislative maps take voting power away from people of color, who tend to vote Democrat.
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
All three lawsuits that have been filed claim that the redrawn maps illegally discriminate against minorities and take away their voting power.
Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Justin Gray was at the state Capitol, where he talked to some of the plaintiffs behind these lawsuits.
The lawsuits have been ready to go for weeks, but the organizations couldn’t file them until Kemp actually signed the bill.
TRENDING STORIES:
- Betty White dies at 99
- Possible tornadoes leave damage behind in parts of metro Atlanta
- COUNTY-BY-COUNTY: What school districts are starting the spring semester virtually?
That several-week delay on top of a months-long delay on getting information from the census to draw the maps adds to the difficulty of the lawsuits.
Because its only a few months until the Georgia primary election, there isn’t much time for the suits to work their way through the court system.
Jery Gonzalez with the Latino group Galeo filed one of the lawsuits. His suit said that Georgia’s population growth has been in minority communities, but that’s not represented in the new districts.
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
Georgia has grown by around 1 million people since 2010, and the majority were Black and brown people.
“They did their best to pack and dilute the minority community’s growth in order to consolidate their power,” Gonzalez said. “We think that’s an illegal use of race in the redistricting process.”
Among the most controversial moves was making Carolyn Bordeaux’s Gwinnett County 7th District seat safely Democratic by turning fellow Democrat Lucy McBath’s neighboring 6th District into a Republican stronghold.
The bill also shifts heavily minority and Democratic sections of West Cobb County into conservative Marjorie Taylor Green’s safely Republican 14th District.
“It’s another form of voter suppression, this packing and dilution,” Gonzalez said.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger countered in a statement, saying,
“Georgia’s maps are fair and adhere to traditional principles of redistricting. These lawsuits are nothing but politically-motivated actions from politically-motivated groups seeking to further their partisan preferences.”
Gray spoke to redistricting law expert Michael Li from New York University about the chances of the legal challenges succeeding.
“Redistricting cases, particularly those alleging racial discrimination, have always been hard to bring,” Li said. “They are often met with skepticism from courts.”
Two of the lawsuits challenge the legislative district. One challenges the Congressional district.
Li said these suits are among more than two dozen suits like this in states across the country, but he said the most important and the ones that are going to get the most attention are the challenges in Georgia and in Texas.
©2021 Cox Media Group
