On Thursday, nine Maryland residents, including two state delegates, aligned with the nonprofit Fair Maps Maryland filed a lawsuit.
Conservative groups and voters in Maryland have filed two lawsuits in the last two days challenging the state’s new congressional maps, which they say are unconstitutional and based on extreme partisan gerrymandering.
On Thursday, nine Maryland residents, including two state delegates, aligned with the nonprofit Fair Maps Maryland filed a lawsuit claiming that the new maps, which were drawn up in “dark backrooms,” are illegal and suppress voters’ rights. The state’s new maps are based on 2010 maps, which critics have called the most gerrymandered in the nation.
The new maps maintain all current officeholders in previous districts and make the only Republican-leaning district more competitive for Democrats, Fair Maps Maryland said. Democrats in Maryland used their political power to benefit their own party and to purposely suppress the voters in the state, the group alleged.
“These Marylanders are victims of electoral corruption and blatant voter suppression, and this lawsuit is their only remedy to undo the damage the General Assembly has perpetuated against them for decades,” Fair Maps Maryland spokesman Doug Mayer said in a prepared statement.
The Fair Maps Maryland lawsuit comes one day after a dozen Maryland Republicans and Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit asking the courts to substitute a map drawn up by a redistricting commission appointed by Republican governor Larry Hogan until a new map can be drawn up, the Baltimore Sun reported. Hogan’s commission drew up a map that more neatly divides the districts and has fewer districts crossing county lines, the paper reported. The maps from Hogan’s commission were rejected by the General Assembly, which is controlled by Democrats.
Maryland Democrats argue that the 2010 redistricting maps largely survived legal challenges, and since the new maps are cleaned-up versions of the old maps, the new maps likely will too.
Republicans in Maryland have accused Democrats and President Joe Biden’s administration of hypocrisy for criticizing alleged gerrymandering in Republican-led states while ignoring similar efforts in blue states like Maryland.
In early December, the Biden administration sued Texas to block its new congressional map, alleging that the state’s redistricting plan intentionally was designed to shut out minorities. Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged that Texas’s redistricting plan was illegal and designed to “deny or abridge the rights of Latino and black voters to vote on account of their race, color or membership in a language minority group.”
In a December 17 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Hogan called on Garland to file a similar lawsuit to challenge Maryland’s redistricting plan. In 2019, the Washington Post noted that Maryland’s third congressional district has been called “the nation’s most bizarrely gerrymandered district.” That district, Hogan said in his op-ed, “stretches across the state from rural areas near Annapolis to include parts of Baltimore city and Montgomery County, the affluent Washington suburb where Mr. Garland lives.”
“Mr. Garland and the Biden administration can live up to their rhetoric by holding both parties accountable for discriminatory gerrymandering — or it can politicize the Justice Department by holding red states and blue states to different standards,” Hogan wrote.
Maryland has a long history of partisan gerrymandering, including in 2010, Fair Maps Maryland said. During a 2017 speech, former governor Martin O’Malley acknowledged that he had engaged in manipulating maps for political purposes, a practice he said he no longer supports.
“As a governor, I held that redistricting pen in my own Democratic hand,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “I was convinced that we should use our political power to pass a map that was more favorable for the election of Democratic candidates.”