A three-judge panel in federal court sided with state officials Friday in a decision upholding Arkansas’s congressional district lines and rejecting arguments that the map discriminates against Black voters by splitting Pulaski County between three of the state’s four House districts.
The lawsuit, Christian Ministerial Alliance v. Thurston, was the second of two challenges to the Arkansas congressional district lines redrawn after the 2020 U.S census. The other case, which included two Black state legislators as plaintiffs, was dismissed by the same panel of judges last fall.
Before 2020, all of Pulaski County was part of the state’s 2nd Congressional District, but the map drawn that year split up the county three ways. Most of Pulaski (and almost all of Little Rock) remained in the 2nd district, but more than 41,000 mostly Black voters in the southern part of the county were moved instead into the 1st and 4th districts. The plaintiffs in both cases said the map was intended to split up and dilute the political power of Black voters.
A 2024 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, raised the bar for plaintiffs alleging racial gerrymandering.
It established a new legal test, under which it is no longer sufficient to show “a plausible inference that race was the ‘predominant factor’ behind the adoption of” the new congressional map, as reporter Matt Campbell wrote for us last September. The order from the court on Friday, written by Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge David Stras, references the Alexander case repeatedly.
Stras said the plaintiffs in the Arkansas case couldn’t prove that race — as opposed to other considerations — was the predominant factor motivating the decision to split up Pulaski County. Those factors include “legitimate political objectives,” such as drawing maps that are more favorable to Republicans. While explicitly racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional, partisan gerrymandering is generally fair game, according to the federal courts.
The plaintiffs presented the court with several alternative maps to try to show that the Legislature “could have drawn the district lines to achieve both ‘legitimate political objectives’ and ‘significantly greater racial balance,’ without sacrificing ‘traditional districting principles.’” Those principles include “core retention” — drawing lines in such a way to minimize change and keep each district’s population together.
The court wasn’t persuaded. Stras wrote that the first alternative map did worse at “core retention” and would likely result in a worse political outcome for Republicans. “These problems plausibly explain why it was not the Republican-controlled General Assembly’s choice,” he said. The same went for the other alternatives, Stras said.
Attorney General Tim Griffin celebrated the decision, which he said “confirms that our congressional districts are legal and proper.”
“The District Court’s ruling is consistent with the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, in which the high court wrote that a party must first disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove racial motivation rather than partisanship,” Griffin said.
