Miami groups try to overturn court ruling that kept ‘gerrymandered’ map in effect
Two days after a federal appeals court blocked a new city of Miami voting map drawn by community groups from being used in the November elections, those Miami community groups have challenged that decision.
On Sunday, American Civil Liberties Union lawyers representing the Miami community groups requested that the U.S. Supreme Court step in to vacate the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta and reject using the city’s map in November. To allow the map to remain in effect would result in November elections occurring “under a system that explicitly and unconstitutionally sorts Miamians by race,” the groups said.
READ MORE: What’s my district? Appeals court makes ruling in Miami voting-map lawsuit
The ACLU also urged the court to rule on the matter by Friday.
“The Eleventh Circuit imposes a blatantly unconstitutional map that a federal court found intentionally divides Miami residents by race, assigning residents to districts to match the ‘faces’ of their representative, in an overt system of racial balancing supposedly designed to achieve diversity of representation and ‘harmony in our city,’ ” the ACLU’s latest filing says.
In late July, Judge K. Michael Moore of the U.S. Southern District of Florida found the city’s map unconstitutional. The city then created another map that the ACLU alleges “intentionally replicates the same constitutional violations.”
READ MORE: Judge rejects Miami voting map, adopts new boundaries that pose a problem for Carollo
According to the ACLU’s filings, the Miami-Dade Elections Department hasn’t yet reassigned voters into new districts nor has it mailed out information about the upcoming election.
For the ACLU, that means the court could still implement the redrawn map.
“The City Commission engaged in egregious, explicit, and unapologetic race-based sorting of its residents,” the ACLU filing says. “...Commissioners brazenly explained over the course of a half-dozen public meetings that Miami’s City Commission must continue to have three Hispanic seats, one Black seat, and one ‘Anglo’ [non-Hispanic white] seat.”
Previous decisions in city map debacle
On Friday, a three-judge appellate panel blocked the groups’ redrawn map in a move that adopted a city-approved map for the November elections. The community groups sued the city over a 2022 voting map that they alleged is racially gerrymandered and unconstitutionally packed Hispanic and Black voters into certain districts.
Though the lawsuit is expected to go to trial in 2024, the city needed a map to use for the November elections after the federal judge invalidated the city’s previous map. The judge ordered the city to adopt the map drawn by community groups only to have the appeals court side with the city on Friday.
Under the city’s map, District 3 Commissioner Joe Carollo’s home in northeast Coconut Grove remains inside his district. Under the community groups’ redrawn map, Carollo’s home would have been in District 2, which would create a problem for the commissioner because city law requires commissioners to live inside their districts.
Miami Herald staff writer Joey Flechas contributed to this report.
