Kansas Democrats filed a lawsuit Monday suing top Republican state officials over Kansas’s recently enacted US congressional district map. Democrats allege that Republicans gerrymandered the map to prevent the state’s only Democrat-represented district from being competitive in future elections.
Last week, the Republican-controlled Kansas legislature passed Substitute Senate Bill 355. The bill contained the state’s newly drawn map for four US Congressional districts. The bill was passed in three days through veto-override votes in the Senate and House.
The map immediately raised concerns over partisan and racial gerrymandering. Gerrymandering occurs when a district map is manipulated so as to benefit one interest over another through unfair means. So, despite the fact that over forty percent of Kansans voted for Democratic candidates in recent statewide elections, all four Kansas congressional seats would likely be occupied by Republican representatives.
The current Kansas map contains one competitive district, the Third District, in the Kansas City metro area. That district is represented by Congresswoman Sharice Davids and contains a large population of racial and ethnic minority voters. Recently, Democrat and racial and ethnic minority voters in the Third District joined forces to elect Davids, a Democrat. Under the new map, however, neither voting population has enough influence to make that possible again.
Democrats claim that the new Republican-drawn district map violates the Kansas Constitution in a variety of ways. First, they claim that sorting districts based on political belief to minimize minority influence violates the state’s equal protection clause. Second, they claim the map denies minority voters their ability to freely speak and assemble. Third, they claim the map prevents minority voters from translating their votes into seats in violation of the right of suffrage.
As a result, Democrats are asking the court to declare the new map invalid under the Kansas Constitution, prevent the map from taking effect and order the legislature to draw a new, fair map.
