By JEFF AMY
ATLANTA — A federal judge on Thursday accepted new Georgia congressional and legislative voting districts that protect Republican partisan advantages, saying the creation of new majority-Black voting districts solved the illegal minority vote dilution that led him to order maps to be redrawn.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, in three separate but similarly worded orders, rejected claims that the new maps don’t do enough to help Black voters. Jones said he can’t interfere with legislative choices, even if Republicans moved to protect their power. The maps were redrawn in a recent special legislative session after Jones in October ruled that maps drawn in 2021 illegally harmed Black voters.
The maps added Black-majority districts that Jones ordered, including one in Congress, two in the state Senate and five in the state House. But in some Democratic-held districts without Black majorities, Republicans redrew the maps to favor themselves. One of those is Democratic U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath’s 7th Congressional District in suburban Atlanta.
McBath said she would seek reelection in 2024 in the new 6th Congressional District in Fulton, Cobb, Douglas and Fayette counties if the current congressional map is not overturned on appeal. It would be the second election in a row that she has had to run in a new district. The first, in 2022, was after the district she originally won was redrawn to favor Republicans.
McBath said in a statement that she wouldn’t “allow an extremist few Republicans” to “decide when my work in Congress is finished.”
The redrawing of the districts this year was among numerous redistricting actions that took place across the South after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1964 Voting Rights Act in June, clearing the way for Black voters to win changes from courts. But while a case in Alabama will almost certainly result in another Democrat joining its congressional delegation, the Georgia case has played out…
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