'Severe' harm: Federal court finds Black voters' rights violated in Mississippi

Mississippi lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against Black voters in their legislative redistricting plan, a federal district court ruled Tuesday.

In an opinion released by the Northern Division of the Southern District of Mississippi and highlighted by The Redistricting Network, a three-judge panel found that legislators improperly diluted Black voting power in the state House and Senate by racially gerrymandering districts. The new maps contain the same number of Black-majority districts as the maps in prior elections — but, the court found, they still improperly sought to dilute voting power by race.

"If left as is, Black voters in each affected district will be served for a full term by a legislator chosen in an election that diluted Black votes," stated the ruling. "The harm is localized, but it is severe to the affected voters. This is the exact kind of injury that warrants a remedy."

The ruling allows the Mississippi legislature to try to create remedial maps and submit them to the court, and orders that special elections for the revised districts will take place when a new map has been created.

In recent years, efforts to combat racial gerrymandering, which falls under the purview of both the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, have seen mixed results before the far-right Supreme Court.

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In the landmark Allen v. Milligan case, the justices upheld a finding that Alabama unlawfully gerrymandered its congressional districts in violation of the Voting Rights Act; however, this term, they reversed a challenge to South Carolina's congressional districts, sharply weakening the ability to bring Fourteenth Amendment challenges to racial gerrymanders in the process.

Meanwhile, in an issue that could eventually come before the Supreme Court, right-wing judges have sought to limit the "private right of action" of individual voters to bring lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act, which, if the justices adopt the theory, would render the U.S. Justice Department as the only entity that could bring such cases — potentially gutting the Voting Rights Act altogether during times where a president that doesn't support it is in office.