A new federal lawsuit challenges Florida’s redistricting of four congressional seats and seven state House districts, accusing the state of racially gerrymandering these districts and violating the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs, including five voters and three organizations, argue that the state treated Latino voters as a political monolith, undermining the diverse nature of South Florida’s Hispanic community.
The ACLU of Florida and two other law firms filed the lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on behalf of Cubanos Pa’lante, Engage Miami, the ACLU Club at Florida International University and five local residents. A three-judge panel in Miami will hear the case.
The plaintiffs argued the Florida Legislature ignored the diversity of South Florida’s Latino and Hispanic voters. Instead, the plaintiffs argued, the state made strange-shaped districts just to group Latino voters together, even if it meant ignoring city and county lines or crossing natural barriers like the Everglades.
“Politicians who treat us as nothing more than a checkbox on the census form cannot be trusted with the mapmaking pen,” said Luis Sorto, a West Miami resident and one of the individual plaintiffs, in a news release. “Our diversity is our strength. We won’t stop fighting until these gerrymanders are replaced with fair maps that recognize the full diversity and richness of our community.”
Because the lawsuit was filed when it was, it is unlikely to affect the 2024 elections regardless of how the courts rule.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office did not return requests for comment on Thursday.
A spokeswoman for Florida House Speaker Paul Renner said his office was reviewing the lawsuit and wouldn’t comment on pending litigation.
ARE LATINOS ‘SWING VOTERS’?
Florida’s legislators repeatedly acknowledged they drew certain districts in 2021 and 2022 to focus on the number of Hispanic and Latino voters in those seats because the Republican leadership believed the districts had special protections afforded to them under the state’s Fair Districts Amendments and the federal Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuit accuses the state of treating Hispanic voters as political monoliths when in fact, in South Florida, they are swing voters who don’t vote cohesively.
“In crafting the Challenged Districts, the Legislature ignored this diversity and assumed that Hispanic voters in South Florida were politically homogenous and monolithic,” the lawsuit said. “This assumption was false. The Legislature was not entitled to draw race-based districts based on uninformed assumptions of racial sameness.”
That’s important because federal courts have said districts might qualify for special protections under the Voting Rights Act only if a racial minority votes cohesively and if white voters vote cohesively to block the minority-preferred candidates. In South Florida, the lawsuit argues, that doesn’t apply.
Electoral evidence seems to bear that out.
From 2016 through 2020, two of Miami-Dade’s three Latino-majority congressional districts saw incumbent parties ousted twice each. In 2016, all three districts elected Republicans. In 2018, two of the districts saw Democrats win, and in 2020, those same two districts switched back to Republicans.
Miami-Dade’s Latino-majority House districts have also seen the sharpest political swings in the state.
Eleven of the 12 state House districts that saw the largest swing to Donald Trump in 2020 compared to 2016 were Hispanic majority seats in South Florida. The twelfth was a Hispanic-plurality seat also in Miami-Dade.
In fact, in another lawsuit, Florida argued Hispanic voters were “swing voters”. A federal judge in Tallahassee accepted that argument and wrote that Hispanic voters were “not particularly affiliated with either party.”
Similarly, the Florida Supreme Court questioned last decade whether some of South Florida’s Latino voters had enough of a cohesive political identity to warrant protected districts.
The lawsuit challenges Congressional Districts 19, 26, 27, and 28 and House Districts 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, and 119.
ABANDONING RACE NEUTRALITY
Despite state leaders’ insistence on race-neutral redistricting, Gov. DeSantis’ aides and legislative leaders admitted to using racial data to prioritize racial considerations in Latino-majority districts.
“The maps are both race-neutral in areas, and, you know, also based on race in the areas that are protected,” said Florida House Redistricting Chairman Tom Leek, a Republican, when the Legislature debated its congressional map.
This led to one congressional district – the 26th – that stretches from Immokalee to Hialeah and Wynwood in Miami. The plaintiffs argue the interests of the farmworkers of Immokalee and the urban voters in Wynwood aren’t served by such a sprawling district.
Even as state leaders balked at keeping a Jacksonville-based congressional district that allowed Black voters to elect their preferred candidates, with Gov. Ron DeSantis calling for “race-neutral” redistricting, DeSantis’ aides and legislative leaders had no problems admitting they had used racial data to connect disparate Hispanic populations in these districts, even if it meant stretching from rural Collier County across the Everglades to urban Hialeah and Wynwood.
This also turned Southwest Florida’s white-majority Congressional District 19 into a sprawling shape that stretched up the coast, avoiding communities where migrant workers and other Hispanic residents lived. At one point, that district narrowed to just four miles wide.
University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald said it would be very easy to draw a compact heavily Cuban district by combining Hialeah and Little Havana, instead of the current sprawling seat. Doing so, he said, would make the surrounding districts more Democratic.
Legislative leaders defended narrow House districts that violated compactness principles by saying it was important to focus on the Hispanic population in those seats. Leek at one point said a more compact alternative wasn’t possible because they were keeping the Hispanic demographics in mind.
Yet Leek and other Republican leaders refused to answer questions about Hispanic voting patterns or turn over public records about the issue.
Despite saying they’d hired a consultant to do racial voting analyses, the Legislature refused to turn over those analyses to The Tributary.
When Democrats pressed the Republicans on the issue, they claimed the analyses were privileged and performed by consultants hired by lawyers.
THE STATE OF FLORIDA REDISTRICTING LAWSUITS
Over the last three years, the ACLU of Florida has prioritized its redistricting work, winning lawsuits against the cities of Miami and Jacksonville for their local redistricting plans, and securing court approval for new maps in Bradford, Jackson and Taylor counties, along with the city of Starke. The nonprofit law firm has also initiated a lawsuit challenging Tampa Bay’s senate districts.
One of this lawsuit’s lead attorneys penned a law review article specifically questioning whether the protections that the state afforded to its South Florida Latino districts were appropriate.
Before the Legislature approved the plan, an analysis released by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Latino Policy and Politics Initiative found that Latino voters overall didn’t vote cohesively, but some who shared national origins did. The current South Florida districts combine heavily Cuban populations with other Latino groups, which might reduce the political influence of Latino voters from other Central and South American origins.
While the Voting Rights Act and Florida’s Fair Districts Amendments protect racial and language minority groups, including the Hispanic and Latino ethnicity, they don’t protect voters on the basis of national origin, which is why districts don’t specifically protect Cuban or non-Cuban Hispanic voters.
McDonald recently presented research he conducted with two other academics, which he is preparing to publish, showing that Hispanic voters in South Florida aren’t cohesive. “The evidence shows a lack of cohesion between high-participatory Cubans and voters from other Hispanic groups, but the districts are drawn to combine the two,” he said.
In a similar lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Florida alleging the Florida Senate districts were racially gerrymandered, a three-judge federal panel chided the state’s lawyers for not understanding racial gerrymandering claims. In that case, the state filed a motion to dismiss, arguing the lawsuit failed to prove vote dilution, a separate type of lawsuit.
“Defendants are confused,” the panel wrote dismissively.
Because this lawsuit argues the state overly relied on race and ethnicity in its redistricting, it presents a new type of argument than one the state has faced in the other congressional lawsuits it has successfully beat back so far.
The state successfully defended against a lawsuit that had argued DeSantis and the Legislature intentionally discriminated against Black voters during the redrawing of North Florida congressional districts, turning a seat that had elected a Black Democrat into a whiter, more Republican seat,
And while a trial court judge found the state violated the Fair Districts Amendments when it redrew those North Florida seats, an appellate court disagreed. That case has been appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.
In this case, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue Florida specifically prioritized racial considerations for the Hispanic population in those districts even though Hispanic voters don’t have a common political identity, which would violate the 14th Amendment.
The South Florida Hispanic districts are among the least compact in the state and most likely to ignore geographic boundaries like roads, waterways and city and county borders.
Leek, the House redistricting chairman, even acknowledged that districts protecting Black voters could do so with demographics as low as 29% Black in some cases, but Latino districts could need to be as high as 70% Hispanic. That is due, in part, to Black voters cohesively voting for certain candidates while Latino voters vote in a less unified way.
