As predicted, a lawsuit has been filed against the Florida congressional redistricting map signed into law Monday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Equal Ground Education Fund, a Black-led organization that works to increase Black political power in Florida, filed a 71-page lawsuit in the Second Judicial Circuit in Leon County on behalf of 18 individual plaintiffs who live throughout the state. The suit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to stop the new map from going into effect.
The map, created by DeSantis’ office and approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature last week, is expected to give Republicans as many as four new seats to add to the 20 out of 28 seats they already represent in Florida.
“The 2026 Plan is, by traditional measures of partisan gerrymandering, one of the most extreme gerrymanders in American history,” the complaint declares.
The lawsuit says that the GOP-controlled Legislature approved and DeSantis signed into law a map that violates the 2010 Fair Districts Amendments, which prohibits drawing congressional (and state legislative) districts that favor incumbents or a political party.
The lawsuit notes that Jason Poreda, the governor’s map drawer, admitted when speaking before the Legislature last week that he used partisan data. Additionally, Mo Jazil, the governor’s attorney, and David Axelman, the governor’s general counsel, confirmed before the Legislature that the map’s legal justification depends on the Florida Supreme Court striking down Fair Districts in their entirety.
Both attorneys said last week that they believe the Fair Districts ban on drawing districts to diminish racial or language minorities’ ability to elect representatives of their choice violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and thus is unenforceable. They also argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case last week confirms their premise.
“[M]ost remarkably, having argued that the Fair Districts Amendment’s race-related protections are unconstitutional, Axelman argued that the entire Fair Districts Amendment must fall with them, including the Amendment’s prohibition on partisan gerrymandering and Tier II requirements to draw compact districts and to use political and geographic boundaries where feasible,” the lawsuit says.
“That conclusion is not only legally baseless, it is transparently convenient, as it would free the Legislature to engage in precisely the kind of partisan gamesmanship that Florida voters amended their Constitution to prohibit.”
The lead law firm working for the plaintiffs is the Elias Law Group, a Washington firm that has previously handled much of the Democratic Party’s redistricting litigation.
‘Carving up the state’
The lawsuit notes that Jazil acknowledged that DeSantis’ nonseverability argument — that the entirety of Fair Districts would be unenforceable, including its ban on partisan gerrymandering, if it’s race-related provisions are unconstitutional — “is the Governor’s own legal theory, not a conclusion any court has reached. Nor is it a conclusion that the Florida Supreme Court is likely to reach.”
Regarding that nonseverability argument, the lawsuit notes that veteran Republican Sen. Don Gaetz does not agree. Speaking on the floor of the Senate last week as he presented the bill, Gaetz said, “I believe that the rest of the Fair Districts Amendment could and should and ought to stand. I don’t think we should do gerrymandering on the basis of political partisanship. … I believe that we should be required to follow all of the other demands of the Fair Districts Amendment.”
The suit says the new map “radically reshapes” Florida’s congressional lines, “carving up the State to the benefit of the Republican Party.”
It notes the plan splits the heavily Democratic city of Tampa into three separate districts, none of which contains a majority of Tampa’s population, pairing them with “faraway, rural voters.” And it says that the plan splits the Democratic-leaning population of Orlando five ways, “even though it only has the population for two congressional districts.”
In South Florida, the lawsuit says, the way the map carves up voters to make it harder for Democrats to win “is nothing less than shocking.”
And it says that in North Florida, no changes have been made whatsoever — specifically congressional districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 — all of which have reliably elected Republicans.
That’s despite the fact that “they have some of the fastest growing populations including in St. John’s County (CDs 5 and 6) and Flagler County (CD 6) both of which the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research reports have grown by more than 20% since 2020, which is, of course, one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ main purported justification for the need to redraw districts.”
“The question is not whether this map is a partisan gerrymander, because it is,” said Elias Law Group Partner Abha Khanna in a statement. “The question is why Governor DeSantis and Florida Republicans think they can blatantly ignore the Florida Constitution and the instructions of their own voters.”
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd and the Florida Senate and Florida House are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
–Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix
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