Alexander v. SC Conference of NAACP (22-807)
argument 22-807Alexander v. SC Conference of NAACP
Supreme Court of the United States
2h 5m
8 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 8 days ago
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What is the central issue being argued in Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP?
We will hear argument this morning in Case 22-807, Alexander v. the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. Mr. Gore?
Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the Court. District 1 is not a racial gerrymander. Rather, the General Assembly largely preserved District 1 from the Constitutional Benchmark Plan and made changes based on traditional criteria in politics. The panel acknowledged that the General Assembly pursued a political goal of increasing District 1's Republican vote share. It achieved that goal by moving Republicans into the district and Democrats out of the district. All of the direct evidence confirms that it used political data, not racial data, to identify Republicans and Democrats. The panel declared District 1 a racial gerrymander only by departing from this Court's precedence and adopting sua sponte, an erroneous racial target theory.
First, the panel failed to enforce the alternative map requirement. In a circumstantial case like this, only such an alternative can disentangle race and politics. Second, the panel's racial target theory hyperentangled race and politics and simply makes no sense. The panel believed the General Assembly needed a racial target in Charleston County to achieve its political goal district-wide. But a 17% racial target says nothing about voter turnout, says nothing whatsoever about the predominant majority of voters in predominantly white Charleston County, and also is irreconcilable with District 1's recent electoral history. Moreover, even the panel agreed that the General Assembly made political changes in other parts of District 1 without using a racial target.
The General Assembly had no reason to and did not use a racial target. It used political data to pursue its political goals. If left uncorrected, the decision below will undermine this Court's holding that partisan gerrymandering claims are not justiciable. Partisan gerrymandering claims can always be repackaged as racial gerrymandering claims if all plaintiffs in lower courts have to do is ignore direct evidence of intent, infer a racial target from the correlation between race and politics, and point to malleable expert analysis. This Court should reverse and not allow its exacting precedents to be so easily subverted. I welcome the Court's questions.
Mr. Gore, we review this for clear error, and the District Court credited the plaintiff's expert and found your expert's non-credible. So how does that meet the clear error standard?
The Court will proceed to clear error if it rejects our legal arguments, but let me turn to Dr. Ragusa first. All three of Dr. Raguse's opinions raised in this appeal contradict his own data and conclusions in his initial report, which actually demonstrated that race did not predominate in the enacted plan's changes to District 1. His own data showed that politics was a stronger predictor than race of whether a VTD was moved out of District 1. He also concluded that there was no statistically significant correlation between race and whether VTDs were moved into District 1. That's at page 187 of the joint appendix and page 514 of our jurisdictional appendix. So those facts alone establish that Dr. Ragusa's three opinions at issue in this appeal are unreliable and unprobative.
But there's even more. For each of those three opinions, Dr. Ragusa committed other errors. He did not control for VTD location or proximity to the district line. He also did not control for where in the district voters live.
Well, I thought he said that As far as geographic contiguity, the size of the different districts was an adequate proxy for that.
He did say that traditional principles were embedded in his analysis, but whatever he meant by that, he did also admit on cross-examination that he didn't test or control for those principles and whether they explained the decisions the General Assembly actually made. That's the same error that the Did your expert
present an alternative study? which did control for geography and reached a different result?
He did not try to mirror, Dr. Ragusev said.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central issue being argued in Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP?
0:00–15:12
2
How does the panel address the alleged failure to enforce the alternative‑map requirement?
15:12–30:29
3
What specific flaws did counsel identify in Dr. Ragusa’s expert analysis?
30:29–45:45
4
How is the clear‑error standard applied to racial‑gerrymandering findings?
45:45–1:00:57
5
Why does the court consider the 2020 presidential election data reliable for assessing legislative intent?
1:00:57–1:16:18
6
Why is an alternative map considered essential for proving racial predominance in this case?
1:16:18–1:32:27
7
What burden do plaintiffs face when trying to disentangle race and politics in redistricting cases?
1:32:27–1:48:46
8
What are the potential implications if the Supreme Court reverses the district court’s findings?
1:48:46–2:05:03