Judge says Florida can use new congressional map for Midterms

A Leon County Circuit Judge has denied a motion to put off use of a new congressional map in Florida until after the Midterms.

Judge Joshua Hawkes, who was appointed to his seat by Gov. Ron DeSantis, said he could not immediately determine whether a challenge brought by voting rights groups would likely win on the merits. Presented with 1,900 pages of briefs from plaintiffs challenging the map and more than 220 pages of evidence defending the state, he said a decision could not be rendered at this stage.

The order is sure to be appealed, and will likely land before the Florida Supreme Court for a final decision.

Plaintiffs challenging the map say the new cartography, proposed by DeSantis’ Office and approved by Florida’s Legislature in a Special Session, is illegal.

The map results in 24 congressional districts where a majority of voters supported Republican Donald Trump for President in 2024 and just four where a majority voted for Democrat Kamala Harris. Florida’s delegation currently has eight Democratic U.S. Representatives, a number that could be cut in half under the new map.

“This is just about as clear cut of an example of prohibitive partisan gerrymandering as one could think of,” said Brad Heard, Deputy Legal Director to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the groups that sued over the map.

Florida voters in 2010 passed the Fair Districts amendment to the state constitution barring the use of partisan intent to draw a map favoring or disfavoring a political party.

But DeSantis’ administration has argued that a 2025 Florida Supreme Court decision upholding a map also drawn by the Governor’s Office severely undercut language in the Fair Districts amendment prohibiting the diminishment of minority voting power. Mohammad Jazil, an attorney for Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, said it’s impossible to discard that part of the amendment without presuming all of it, including the ban on partisan intent, should be null and void.

Along with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision increasing a threshold for drawing minority majority seats, the state said a new map must be implemented in a timely fashion.

Regardless, administration officials argued in a court brief that plaintiffs have not in the few weeks since the map was unveiled come close to proving partisan intent.

“Plaintiffs haven’t met the fact-specific test for showing that the State has run afoul of the prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering. Nor have they shown that the State has run afoul of the preferences for compactness and adherence to political and geographic boundaries,” reads a brief filed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s Office.

Plaintiffs say it’s not a hard case to make. They point to DeSantis’ Office releasing the map to Fox News with districts colored in red and blue to show GOP gains as proof that the map was made to please Republicans. And the timing of the redraw, in the midst of multistate redistricting wars by GOP- and Democratic-controlled states, shows the clearest motive for a mid-decade remake of political boundaries.