Supreme Court could overhaul voting rights litigation in possible gerrymandering case

A new voting rights case bubbling up to the Supreme Court has the potential to transform how voting rights are litigated in the courts.

On Monday, the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – which prohibits the “denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color through voting qualifications or prerequisites” – does not explicitly grant a private right of action.

In other words, the Eighth Circuit decided that individuals or advocacy groups who believe a state is violating a voter’s rights can’t bring a lawsuit – only the federal government can do so. In the case in question, the court said a local NAACP group in Arkansas, which is suing the state over redistricting maps that the group says discriminated against Black voters, needs to convince the Justice Department to take up their case.

“Did Congress give private plaintiffs the ability to sue under [Section 2] of the Voting Rights Act? Text and structure reveal that the answer is no, so we affirm the district court’s decision to dismiss,” the ruling states.

Legal experts said that the case is likely to make its way up to the highest court in the land, giving the nine justices the opportunity to examine the Voting Rights Act in a presidential election year.

“Justice [Neil] Gorsuch had indicated that this is a significant issue, and the Eighth Circuit just agreed that there isn’t a private right of action. Resolution of this question is clearly headed to the Supreme Court for resolution,” Jason Torchinsky, a partner at Holzman Vogel and an expert in election law, noted.

Monday’s ruling applies only to federal courts covered by the Eighth Circuit, which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

But there are several pending lawsuits by private groups that are challenging political maps drawn by legislators across the country.

In 2021, Gorsuch, who lawyers refer to as a “textualist,” indicated that at some point the Supreme Court needs to decide if Congress assumed a private right to action in the Voting Rights Act or not.

“I join the court’s opinion in full, but flag one thing it does not decide,” Gorsuch wrote at the time, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. “Our cases have assumed — without deciding — that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied cause of action under section 2.”

Mike Dimino, law professor at Widener University Commonwealth Law School in Pennsylvania, said the difficulty with the Eighth Circuit’s argument is that “the Supreme Court’s attitude in the mid-’60s was much more open to the creation of a private right of action where a statute was ambiguous.”

“If you’re in Congress, and you’re writing a statute in the mid-’60s, you look at the Supreme Court’s precedent at the time, and you say, ‘All right, well, this is what the Supreme Court does,'” Dimino said.

“But the statute has gone on now for more than 55 years, and the Supreme Court hasn’t decided squarely whether these suits are available or not,” he said.

Dimino says he believes it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would affirm the Eighth Circuit’s decision should it decide to take up the case.

The Legal Defense Fund, a civil rights group, criticized the Eighth Circuit’s decision by saying that it means “[i]ndividuals who experience voting discrimination on account of their race will be prevented from suing under the Voting Rights Act (VRA)’s critical Section 2 provisions to vindicate them and must instead rely on the discretion and limited resources of the U.S. Attorney General.”

The group also called the ruling “a stark departure from six decades of decisions in hundreds of Section 2 cases,” pointing to the recent Supreme Court case Allen v. Milligan.

In that case, which was decided this year, a 5-4 majority affirmed a lower court decision that ruled in favor of Black voters in Alabama who challenged the state’s GOP-friendly map, concluding the state likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Should the Eighth Circuit case be petitioned to the Supreme Court, it could set up a timeline for the case to be decided during a presidential election year.