An appeals court on Aug. 25 overturned a lower court block on Georgia’s 2021 state and congressional election maps.

The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit said its decision was motivated by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from April, which made it tougher to use Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to compel states to consider race as a primary factor when drawing congressional maps.

Supreme Court precedent has allowed states to draw maps that give an advantage to one political party or the other.

The recent decision means any challenge to a new map that “fails to disentangle race and partisan goals wrongly intrudes on a state’s prerogative” and cannot be overturned using the Voting Rights Act, the court said. 

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ordered Georgia in 2023 to redraw its congressional and state legislature maps on the grounds that the previous maps diluted minority voting power. 

Tuesday’s ruling vacated that decision and sends the case back to the district court for reconsideration.

The case arose from three separate lawsuits, filed by members of an all-black fraternity and two other groups of plaintiffs. The suits alleged that maps approved by Georgia’s state Legislature in 2021 diluted minority voting power. 

The cases were later consolidated, and in a mammoth 516-page order, Jones found that the state’s maps violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

According to the Act, no state can implement a “qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure” that prevents someone from voting based on their race or color.

Courts have ruled that the Act sometimes allows states to consider race when drawing electoral lines, but that electoral maps drawn explicitly based on race are unconstitutional. The law has been interpreted to forbid racial gerrymandering when it is used to dilute or concentrate minority voting power.

Similar rulings occurred in Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana. In those states too, Congressional maps were redrawn—by court order—to add extra majority-minority districts. 

But in Louisiana, a group of non-minority plaintiffs sued, arguing the state’s new Congressional map was unconstitutional because it was drawn explicitly on race-based factors.

The matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in April’s decision for the landmark case Louisiana v. Callais, justices ruled 6–3 that the Voting Rights Act does not require states to create extra majority-minority districts.

“Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s [Section 2] precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

Matthew Vadum contributed to this report.