Supreme Court Ignores Discrimination In Voting Booth, UF Experts Say

July 31, 1996

GAINESVILLE — Are Americans color-blind when they enter the voting booth?

The U.S. Supreme Court apparently thinks so.

In its recent decisions, most notably last year’s ruling in the Georgia case of Miller v. Johnson, the Supreme Court has attempted to remove race as a consideration in drawing legislative districts, creating a revolution in voting rights unparalleled since the 1960s.

Voting rights expert Richard Scher said the court is trying to take the issue of race and “sweep it under the table.”

“How can we squarely address America’s continuing racial and minority issues?” said Scher, a political scientist at the University of Florida who has co-authored a new book on voting rights. “How can we deal with those folks and their concerns by ignoring them or pretending it’s not there?”

Scher and co-author Jon Mills, a UF law professor and director of the Center for Governmental Responsibility at the UF College of Law, have achieved national recognition for their expertise in voting rights and districting. Their new book, Voting Rights and Democracy: The Law and Politics of Districting, discusses the development over the last 30 years of new legal and political conceptions of voting rights. Mills researched and analyzed the legal implications of the recent court rulings, while Scher focused on the political analysis.

“The Supreme Court has made a major turn, which is why the issue of voting rights is more and more volatile,” said Mills, a former Speaker of the Florida House. “The Supreme Court’s ruling now says that you must have a compelling interest to create a minority district. This ruling makes future minority districts even more difficult to create.”

The court’s decision in the Miller case “really threw everything into chaos,” Scher said. In that and other recent decisions on voting rights and affirmative action, he said, the court is trying to move race away from being a high priority on the American political and legal agenda. By removing race as a consideration in drawing districts, legislatures around the country will probably become “more white and less reflective of the heterogeneity of the American public,” he said.

“We’re returning to a more majoritarian concept in which the majority rules,” Scher said. “And while we don’t want to ignore minorities, they can’t simply expect by the fact that they exist that their concerns will necessarily be addressed or even listened to. I think that represents a rather sharp change from what we’ve seen in the last 30 years in American politics.”

While Mills believes minority access districts shouldn’t be viewed as a permanent part of American politics, “if there’s a high degree of racial discrimination in the voting booth, there ought to be some specific way to solve that,” he said. Still, the court’s decisions are going to make future efforts to re-draw districts “very difficult,” he said.

“We’re about to hit an election cycle when states are going to have to reapportion based on new and ambiguous standards,” Mills said. “Unfortunately, what you’ll have is some attempts by whoever is in control to try to create districts based on political bias.”

Scher, who has worked on reapportionment since he and Mills re-drew districts for the Jacksonville city council several years ago, said he finds the work fascinating. The Supreme Court, however, has only made things “more ambiguous and elusive” by its decisions, he said.

“It’s not much help to just say what you can’t do,” Scher said. “We have to know what we can do or what we must do. The Supreme Court refuses to tell us either one of those. It’s like wandering around in the dark in a swamp. You just don’t know when you’re going to take a misstep and fall.”