In 2 Rulings, Justices Limit Scope of Voting Rights Act : Law: Supreme Court overturns Florida plan to boost Latino lawmakers and rejects challenge to Georgia’s one-member commission structure.

In two long-awaited decisions, the Supreme Court Thursday dashed the hopes of civil rights advocates that the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act could be expanded.

The court unanimously overturned a Florida redistricting plan that increased the number of Latino-dominated districts in the state’s House of Representatives. The court said the law does not require that the maximum number of districts be created in which racial or ethnic minorities would constitute a voting majority.

In a separate case, by a 5-4 margin the court rejected the claim of black plaintiffs, upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, that the voting rights law requires a Georgia county to change the structure of its one-member commission form of government to assure representation to black voters.

The decisions “are bad news from our perspective,” said Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. However, Shaw and other voting rights lawyers found some comfort in the fact that the court decision in the Florida case was narrowly drawn and that the type of government in the Georgia case is unique to that state.

“Both these cases are a continuation of the conservative trend in the court’s view of voting rights cases,” said Neil Bradley an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the Georgia case. “But they are not a a dramatic retrenchment.”

The Florida case (Johnson vs. DeGrandy, 92-519, 92-593, 92-767), stemmed from a federal district court ruling that Florida’s redistricting plans for both the state House and Senate violated the Voting Rights Act. Because it held that the House plan diluted Latino voting strength, the lower court ordered the creation of two more Latino voting districts in Dade County (Miami).

It ordered the change even though Latinos constituted a voting majority in nine of the House districts in the county, or 45%, a ratio roughly equivalent to their percentage of the county’s population. It did not order changes in Senate districts because it concluded that to do so would harm the interests of minority groups. The U.S. Department of Justice appealed the district court’s ruling on the state Senate but the justices upheld the lower court ruling.

“This just underscores the need for Hispanics and African Americans to find a way to work out their differences outside the courts,” said Shaw of the Legal Defense Fund.

In rejecting the court-ordered plan for the lower house of the Legislature, which had been appealed by the state of Florida, Justice David H. Souter challenged the lower court’s reasoning that anything less than creating the maximum number of minority-dominated districts possible would amount to dilution of minority voting rights under the law.

Noting the close correlation between the number of districts in which Latinos would be an effective majority with the proportion of Latinos in the voting age population, Souter wrote: “One may suspect vote dilution from political famine but one is not entitled to suspect (much less infer) dilution from mere failure to guarantee a political feast.”

In the Georgia case (Holder vs. Hall, 91-2012), Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who authored the court’s opinion, said that the size of a governing body cannot be challenged as diluting a minority group’s voting strength under the voting rights law.

Georgia’s Bleckley County has always had a one-member county commission. Blacks, who make up 22% of the county population, have never been able to elect a commissioner. The court sent the case back to the Court of Appeals for consideration of whether minority rights had been violated under the Constitution.

“It’s disappointing to see the court take a narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act,” said Brenda Wright, counsel for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed friend-of-the-court briefs in both cases. Nevertheless, she said she was relieved because “these are decisions that are tied closely to the particular facts” and thus would have limited impact in other voting rights disputes.