In 2022, multiple civil rights groups, including the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Cord Byrd and other members of Florida’s government challenging the state’s latest congressional map. The plaintiffs argued that the map violated the 2010 Fair Districts Amendment (FDA) of the Florida Constitution by, among other things, diminishing the voting power of Black voters in the state. 

In September 2022, the Circuit Court of the Second Judicial Circuit held that the congressional map was unconstitutional. Secretary Byrd appealed the decision, and CAC filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs. In December 2023, the First District Court of Appeal ruled against the plaintiffs. Plaintiffs asked the Florida Supreme Court to hear the case, and it agreed to do so. In March 2024, CAC again filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs. Our brief made two central arguments. 

First, our brief argued that the non-diminishment provision of the FDA does not require the plaintiffs to establish geographic compactness. As our brief explained, the Florida Supreme Court has consistently recognized that the FDA’s non-diminishment provision was modelled after Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Both the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have long assessed whether there is a Section 5 violation by comparing the new election law or practice with the existing one, that is, the law that was in place before the new practice was enacted. The First DCA concluded otherwise because it relied on Section 2 precedent to define diminishment. But Sections 2 and 5 serve distinct purposes and operate under different standards. Using a Section 2 standard to define the scope of the non-diminishment provision contravenes the text and history of the FDA and the Florida Supreme Court’s precedents. 

Second, we argued that the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit the state from complying with the Florida Constitution’s non-diminishment provision. As our brief explained, there is nothing constitutionally suspect about the consideration of race to comply with the non-diminishment provision. Indeed, in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Allen v. Milligan that “[t]he contention that mapmakers must be entirely ‘blind’ to race has no footing” in the law. Significantly, state constitutional remedies that protect the voting strength of communities of color help to realize, not flout, the constitutional guarantee of equality. 

In July 2025, the Florida Supreme Court upheld the state’s 2022 congressional map, concluding that the plaintiffs’ proposed remedial district was a racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the court acknowledged that its decision did not change its precedents providing the test for diminishment and that under those precedents the enacted plan diminishes the ability of Black voters to elect representatives of their choice, the court held that the plaintiffs failed to prove that it was possible to draw a remedial map that complied with both the Equal Protection Clause and the non-diminishment provision. The court determined that race predominated in the drawing of the proposed remedial district and that the Legislature’s obligation to comply with the FDA’s non-diminishment provision did not provide sufficient justification to draw a race-predominant district. Because the court concluded that the plaintiffs’ proposed map was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, it upheld the enacted congressional district.