Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP
The Supreme Court reversed a lower court's finding that South Carolina racially gerrymandered its Congressional District 1, ruling that the challengers failed to prove race — rather than the legislature's open partisan goals — drove the map's design.
The decision raises the bar for racial-gerrymandering claims in states where Black voters overwhelmingly favor one party, and creates a new rule requiring courts to draw an inference against challengers who do not submit an alternative map showing the state could have met its partisan goals while including more minority voters.
“Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”
The majority explaining why challengers who skip the alternative-map step face an uphill battle in racial-gerrymandering cases.
How it got here: A three-judge federal district court found racial gerrymandering and vote dilution in South Carolina's Congressional District 1 and permanently blocked elections under that map; South Carolina appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
After the 2020 Census, South Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature openly sought to make Congressional District 1 more reliably Republican. The state's nonpartisan mapmaker moved roughly 193,000 residents in and out of the district, raising its projected Republican vote share to 54.39% while keeping the Black voting-age population at roughly 17%. The NAACP and a Black voter in District 1 sued, arguing the state sorted voters by race — exploiting the tight link between race and Democratic Party loyalty — rather than by partisan preference alone.
The question before the Court
Did South Carolina use race as the dominant factor in redrawing Congressional District 1 to make it safely Republican, or did partisan goals — not race — explain the map's design?
The Court's answer
No — the challengers failed to prove that race, rather than partisan goals, primarily drove South Carolina's redesign of Congressional District 1. Because more than 90% of Black South Carolina voters support Democratic candidates, any map drawn to produce a safely Republican district will naturally have fewer Black voters — so the challengers needed evidence specifically showing race drove the mapmakers' choices, not just that the racial outcome was predictable. Their four expert reports were fatally flawed because they ignored geographic constraints, political partisanship, and core district retention; and they never produced an alternative map showing the state could meet its partisan goal while keeping more Black voters in the district.
The Court also established that when challengers fail to produce such an alternative map — which modern mapping software makes easy to generate — courts must draw an inference against their claim. Because the racial-gerrymandering finding was clearly erroneous, the related vote-dilution claim was separately sent back to the lower court for fresh analysis under the correct legal standard.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Civil rights groups challenging congressional maps on racial grounds must now produce a concrete alternative map or face a strong inference against their case — a burden the Court says is easy to meet with modern software but that, if not met, will likely doom most claims relying on circumstantial evidence. States where race and party affiliation are tightly linked gain significant protection from such suits.
What changes now
The case returns to the three-judge District Court, which must reconsider the vote-dilution claim under the correct legal standard — showing that South Carolina purposely designed District 1 to suppress Black voters' electoral influence. The racial-gerrymandering claim is resolved in South Carolina's favor, meaning the current District 1 map is not blocked on that ground. Any future challengers in similarly high-correlation states will need expert reports that control for partisanship and geography, and almost certainly an alternative map, to have a viable claim.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not declare South Carolina's map constitutional — only that this record of evidence was insufficient to prove racial gerrymandering. It does not address whether the map constitutes an unlawful partisan gerrymander (federal courts cannot hear such claims). The vote-dilution claim remains live on remand and could still result in a court order requiring the map to be redrawn.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (5). Justice Alito (author), joined by Justice Roberts, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett.
Separate writings (1). Justice Thomas (author of a concurrence (in part)).
Dissent (3). Justice Kagan (author), joined by Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson.
Concurrence in part — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas joined all of the majority opinion except Part III-C, which analyzed the expert reports in detail. He wrote separately to argue that racial gerrymandering and vote-dilution claims are nonjusticiable political questions that federal courts have no power to hear at all. He maintained that the Elections Clause assigns supervision of congressional redistricting exclusively to Congress — not courts — and that the racial-predominance standard is inconsistent with the Constitution's colorblind command because any use of race, however minor, should trigger strict scrutiny. He urged the Court to return all district-drawing issues to the political branches.
Dissent — Justice Kagan
Justice Kagan argued the majority effectively inverted the clear-error standard by crediting the losing State's version of events over the three-judge District Court's unanimous factual findings. She contended the challengers presented a more than plausible case: the mapmaker had always consulted racial data in 20 years of prior work, configured his software to display real-time racial statistics while drawing lines, and produced a map that landed on precisely the Black voter percentage the state needed for its partisan goal. The new adverse-inference rule for plaintiffs who omit alternative maps directly contradicts Cooper v. Harris, which explicitly held that no particular form of evidence can be required. Read the full dissent →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The governing test — called the racial-predominance standard — requires challengers to prove that race, not legitimate factors like partisan goals or compactness, was the overriding consideration in a legislature's mapmaking decisions. Courts must begin with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith, and they can reverse it only when the challenger proves race was the criterion that, in the state's view, could not be compromised.
- Because over 90% of Black voters in South Carolina backed the Democratic candidate, race and partisan preference are tightly correlated — which means a map deliberately drawn to secure a Republican majority will naturally look very similar to a racially gerrymandered map. When evidence can plausibly support either a racial or a partisan explanation, the court must draw the inference that favors the legislature; otherwise, plaintiffs could repackage any partisan gerrymander as a racial one, sidestepping the rule that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not heard in federal court.
- The District Court relied on four pieces of circumstantial evidence — the district's stable Black voting-age share despite massive population transfers, the large number of voters moved, the relocation of predominantly Black precincts, and mapmakers' acknowledged awareness of racial data — but the Court found each was equally consistent with the legislature's openly stated partisan goal, and none could overcome the presumption of good faith.
- The four expert reports submitted by the challengers were independently deficient. The two most relied upon (by Dr. Imai and Dr. Ragusa) failed to control for partisanship, geographic contiguity, or core district retention — meaning their computer models could not tell the difference between a racially driven map and one drawn purely for partisan advantage. Without accounting for the very factors the legislature said it used, the reports cannot show that race was the predominant cause of District 1's final shape.
- Perhaps most critically, the challengers produced no alternative map demonstrating that a legislature committed only to its stated partisan goals could have drawn a District 1 with a meaningfully higher share of Black voters. Such maps are easy to generate with modern software — the challengers' own experts produced 20,000 different map configurations — and a plaintiff's failure to offer one should be treated as an implicit concession that no such map can be drawn. Courts must draw an adverse inference from that omission, which will often be dispositive.
- Because the vote-dilution claim rested on the same flawed factual findings, it also cannot stand. Separately, the District Court conflated the two claims: a vote-dilution claim is analytically distinct from racial gerrymandering and requires showing the state purposely designed the district to suppress or cancel minority voters' electoral power — not merely that race played a large role in the mapmaking process. That question is sent back for proper analysis.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Easley v. Cromartie (532 U. S. 234)
Plaintiffs still must show a legislature's partisan goals could have been achieved with greater racial balance.
Reaffirms Miller v. Johnson (515 U. S. 900)
The racial-predominance test and presumption of legislative good faith remain the governing framework.