We’ll never know if Democratic congressional candidate Annie Andrews would have won a 2022 election against Republican Nancy Mace, but we do know one thing: Black voters in Charleston County were bleached out of the 1st Congressional District by targeted racial gerrymandering that impacted the election’s outcome.
Let’s be clear: What the legislature did in 2021’s redistricting was wrong. Legislators got caught — and rightfully so. Now they need to rectify the situation and stop trying to pick winners before an election.
It’s unforgivable that Republican state legislators in 2021 intentionally created a less competitive 1st Congressional District to protect the GOP’s Mace. As outlined in a Friday ruling by three federal judges, the Republican-led General Assembly voted to move just over 30,000 Black voters in Charleston County — mostly from West Ashley and North Charleston — out of the 1st District to drop its overall Black voting percentage to 17%. In doing so, Charleston County’s percentage of Black voters in the district dropped from about 20% in 2020 to 10% in 2022.
In its ruling, the court wrote that state Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston, was the lead proponent of a plan to drop the whole district’s Black percentage to 17% to give it “a stronger Republican lean.” Alternate plans by other groups offered more competitive district plans with a higher percentage of Black voters overall, including one from Democratic state Sen. Dick Harpootlian (21%), the League of Women Voters (23%) and the NAACP (24%).
“The movement of over 30,000 African Americans in a single county from Congressional District No. 1 to Congressional District No. 6 created a stark racial gerrymander of Charleston County,” the court wrote, adding that the legislature-passed 2021 map “made a mockery of the traditional districting principle of constituent consistency.”
To avoid future political meddling in constitutionally mandated reapportionment every 10 years, South Carolina should move to an independent, nonpartisan process of redrawing maps.
According to a redistricting information clearinghouse by Loyola Law School, South Carolina and 26 other states let the legislature redraw districts. But other models take some or all of the politics out of it. Several Western states like California, for example, have independent commissions. Places like Virginia and New Jersey have politician-appointed redistricting commissioners. And some states like Iowa have nonpartisan and bipartisan advisory committees that recommend maps to their legislatures to approve.
Race has been used too long in South Carolina for political purposes on all sorts of issues. It’s time to move beyond race with elections and make sure that House, Senate and congressional districts are fair and competitive, not gerrymandered.
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