(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it filed in the U.S. Supreme Court an amici curiae (friend of the court) brief along with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF), asking the court to eliminate woke, race-based congressional districting and ban the use racial preferences in drawing up “majority minority” congressional districts.
Judicial Watch and AEF ask the court to affirm a lower court ruling which would prevent specifically crowding minority voters into congressional districts.
This Judicial Watch amici brief comes in the case Louisiana v. Phillip Callais et al. (No. 24-109), which is on appeal from the U.S. District Court Western District of Louisiana where the lower court ruled 2-1 to stop the use of a racially-drawn congressional map for future elections.
In their amici brief, Judicial Watch and AEF argue:
This Court has compared race-based districting to segregation of “public parks, . . . buses, . . . and schools,” and warned that we “should not be carving electorates into racial blocs.”
There should be no question that race-based division of citizens for purposes of redistricting is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, the “central purpose” of which “is to prevent the States from purposefully discriminating between individuals on the basis of race….” Racial gerrymandering, like all “[r]acial classifications of any sort” cause “lasting harm to our society” because “[t]hey reinforce the belief, held by too many for too much of our history, that individuals should be judged by the color of their skin.”
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
“We are asking Supreme Court to put an end to race-based congressional districting,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Biden administration jumped into this case at the last minute, seeking to maintain the race-based status quo requiring separating and segregating voters by race for congressional elections. The Trump Justice Department should, instead, urge the court should restore non-discrimination as the foundation of voting rights once again.”
The Allied Educational Foundation is a charitable and educational foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life through education. In furtherance of that goal, the Foundation has engaged in a number of projects, which include, but are not limited to, educational and health conferences domestically and abroad. AEF has partnered frequently with Judicial Watch to fight government and judicial corruption and to promote a return to ethics and morality in the nation’s public life.
Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.
Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.
In November last year, Judicial Watch filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court challenging the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors from Illinois to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law (Rep. Michael J. Bost et al. v. Illinois State Board of Elections and Bernadette Matthews (No. 1:22-cv-02754, 23-2644)).
In May 2024, Judicial Watch sued California under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) to force it to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-3750)).
In March 2024, Judicial Watch, Breakthrough Ideas, Illinois Family Action, and Carol J. Davis sued Illinois officials under the NVRA to force them to clean the State’s voter rolls. (Judicial Watch Inc., et al., v. Illinois State Board of Elections, et al. (No. 1:24-cv-01867).
In December 2023, a notice letter was sent to election officials in the District of Columbia notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letter pointed out that D.C. publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letter threatened a federal lawsuit unless the violations were corrected in a timely fashion. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, DC, officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”
In July 2023 Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.
Judicial Watch in July 2023 also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with Judicial Watch and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.
In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle a Judicial Watch NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit Judicial Watch filed in 2017.
Judicial Watch settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.
Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In February 2022, Judicial Watch settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.
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Source: Judicial Watch
