http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/01/politics/01georgia.html

July 1, 2004

Justices Allow Redistricting in Georgia

By David E. Rosenbaum

WASHINGTON, June 30 - In a judgment that could eventually affect the composition of legislative districts in many states, including New York, the Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a lower-court redistricting plan for the Georgia legislature that benefited Republicans.

The judgment seemed to upset a decades-old understanding that election districts were automatically safe from challenge under the court's one-person, one-vote doctrine if the largest district was no more than 10 percent larger than the smallest.

The action, on the day after the court ended its official session, was called a summary affirmance; the justices' rationale could not be evaluated, since they issued no controlling majority opinion. The vote was 8 to 1, with Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting.

Earlier this year, ruling on different grounds, the court supported the boundaries of Congressional districts in Pennsylvania against Democratic accusations of political gerrymandering and refused to hear a Colorado case in which a state court invalidated an unusual second redistricting plan that favored Republicans.

The most conspicuous redistricting case on appeal to the court is from Texas and may not be acted on before the November election. A new map of Congressional districts was approved there last year at the urging of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader. Republicans drew the new lines after they won full control of the legislature, and those lines are expected to bring the party at least four new House seats in November.

Tim Storey, a redistricting expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said that the legislatures in at least a half-dozen states would now be prone to legal challenge because of the Georgia case and that all states would have to take the case into account when legislative boundaries were drawn after the 2010 census.

In several decisions over the last three decades, the Supreme Court seemed to hold that state and local governments were in compliance with the one-person, one-vote doctrine as long as no election district was 5 percent larger or smaller than the norm. That meant the largest district could be 10 percent larger than the smallest one.

The reasoning was that sometimes districts had to be of somewhat different size to take account of city and county lines and other community interests.

In 2001, the Democrats who controlled the Georgia legislature drew maps for the state's House and Senate in an openly political way. The most possible seats were placed in inner-city Atlanta and rural areas, where the population is mostly Democratic, and the fewest possible were in suburban areas that are predominantly Republican. The district with the most people was 9.9 percent larger than the one with the fewest.

A group of Republicans sued on the ground that the maps violated the one-person, one-vote doctrine. A three-judge federal panel upheld their claim on the ground that the gerrymandering was purely political. That court then produced a legislative map that was more favorable to Republicans.

The Supreme Court affirmed the outcome of the lower court's ruling although, given the absence of a governing opinion, not necessarily the reasoning.

"The only thing that is clear is that the court has taken away what many people believed was a safe harbor of 10 percent," said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Professor Hasen suggested that the court might believe that a 10 percent variation was legitimate in some circumstances but not when the only justification was political gerrymandering, but he said this was just speculation.

Two justices who in the past have held that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer, signed a concurring opinion on Wednesday saying the plan drawn by the Georgia legislature did not meet constitutional standards.

Justice Scalia dissented on the ground that redistricting was entirely a legislative matter and not in the purview of the courts.

In New York, Republicans, drawing the lines for State Senate districts in 2002, managed to add an additional seat upstate by putting fewer people in districts there and more in New York City districts. This is one of several grounds on which Democrats are challenging that redistricting.

The New York case will be before the Supreme Court in the term that begins in October.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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