Politics
State Supreme Court Sends Redistricting Map Back to Legislature
A 4–3 ruling finds that existing district boundaries violate the state constitution's compactness requirements. Lawmakers now have sixty days to submit a remedial plan.
The state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the legislative district map adopted in 2022 violates the compactness provisions of the state constitution, ordering lawmakers to produce a remedial plan within sixty days or face court-imposed boundaries drawn by an independent special master.
The 4–3 decision, written by Associate Justice Lorraine Okafor, found that two districts in the map's northern tier had been configured in ways that "cannot be explained by neutral geographic or administrative criteria" and that "the record before this court offers no credible rebuttal to the inference that partisan advantage was the operative design principle." The majority stopped short of using the word gerrymander, a term with federal constitutional implications the justices appeared to want to avoid.
The three dissenting justices argued that the majority had overstepped by second-guessing a legislative judgment that falls within the political branches' traditional prerogative, and warned that the ruling would invite litigation over every future map the legislature draws.
Legislative leaders in the majority party said they were reviewing the opinion and had not yet decided whether to appeal to the federal courts on independent-state-legislature grounds — a theory that has gained attention in recent years but has not been definitively resolved by the United States Supreme Court in the context of state constitutional provisions.
The minority party called the ruling "a long-overdue correction" and urged the legislature to convene immediately to begin the remedial process rather than consuming time in appeals. "Every day this map stays in place is another day communities are denied fair representation," said the minority caucus chair in a prepared statement.
Good-government groups that had submitted amicus briefs in the case expressed cautious optimism, noting that the court's remedy window is tight. Producing a legally defensible map in sixty days would require the legislature to convene a special session and to engage with public comment requirements that typically take several weeks to satisfy.
The ruling applies to state legislative districts only and does not affect the congressional map, which is subject to a separate pending lawsuit in federal court.
Election law specialists said the timeline creates meaningful uncertainty for upcoming local primaries scheduled in the affected regions, though the court's order does not explicitly address whether elections conducted under the invalidated map would need to be redone.
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