Democracy Docket: The Lawsuit Fighting for Fair Representation in Louisiana’s Capital City

By Peter Robins-Brown, William Most

October 9, 2024

Without a legal remedy, the people of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana’s most populous county, will have to spend at least the next six years living under a misrepresentative local district map that stifles their political voice and exacerbates the parish’s many difficulties, including high poverty and crime rates. But there’s hope. This summer, a group of local elected officials and residents filed suit against the parish, arguing that the map violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the U.S. Constitution.

The federal lawsuit addresses the districts of the East Baton Rouge Metropolitan Council, which is the governing legislative body of the parish. The plaintiffs contend that a new map of council districts, set to go into effect in 2025, violates the law by denying Black voters equal opportunity to elect their chosen candidates.

The plaintiffs rightfully point out that the new map “packs” large numbers of Black voters into a few majority-Black council districts, by placing more than 68.5% of the parish’s Black registered voters into just 42% of the parish’s Metro Council districts. In order to accomplish this remarkable feat of packing, Metro Council members who supported the new map stuffed one district with nearly 90% Black residents and another with nearly 85%. And they did that in a very diverse parish (47.6% white and 46.7% Black, according to the latest Census data) where a more equitable map could have easily been drawn.

East Baton Rouge’s demographics and political representation have changed — but in different directions. 

Unlike other states, Louisiana is divided into 64 parishes instead of counties. The state’s capital, Baton Rouge, lies within East Baton Rouge Parish. The legislative governing body of that parish is the “Metro Council,” which has members elected from 12 districts. 

Although East Baton Rouge was historically majority white, its demographics have changed in recent years. Between the 2010 and 2020 U.S. Censuses, East Baton Rouge’s Black population grew by 5% and its white population decreased by 9%. As a result, the parish’s white population no longer constitutes a majority, and Black residents are now the largest racial group. 

Because of the population changes reflected in the census, East Baton Rouge set out to redraw the lines of its Metro Council districts. But instead of increasing the number of majority-minority districts to reflect the growing Black population, the parish chose a different path. In 2022, the seven white members of the Metro Council voted to approve a map that changed the number of white majority districts from six to seven. 

Although white residents have been declining in numbers in Baton Rouge and no longer are the majority group, the new map would increase white control of the Metro Council by creating an additional majority-white council district. In total, the new map would create seven majority-white districts and five majority-Black districts. 

It’s unfortunate, to say the least, that it’s come to this. East Baton Rouge faces many challenges.

In choosing this map, the Metro Council appears to have disregarded the advice of its own redistricting consultant, Michael Hefner. In a memorandum to the Metro Council, the consultant indicated that choosing seven white-majority districts would not be “a fair representation of the Black population.” 

“These maps violate the very principles on which the Voting Rights Act was created on,” according to Metro Council member Cleve Dunn, Jr., who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “These maps do not give us equal access to political representation because Blacks are the largest ethnic group in East Baton Rouge Parish at 46%, yet we have minority representation on the Metro Council with only (5) five seats.”

This is not the first time that East Baton Rouge has been accused of packing Black voters. In 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice contended that changes to Baton Rouge’s voting maps constituted the “unnecessary packing of the black population” and would result in the “impermissible retrogression of the position of black voters in the City of Baton Rouge.”

This summer, Black council members and community members filed suit. 

The new Metro Council district map is scheduled to go into effect in 2025. On July 26, 2024, all five Black members of the current Metro Council and two local residents filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of Louisiana.

The lawsuit, Dunn v. East Baton Rouge Parish, has two claims. First, it contends that the new map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Second, that it violates the 14th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. 

”The concept of ‘one person, one vote’ is an important principle in American government,” explained Councilmember Chauna Banks, who is also one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “Redistricting based on the decennial Census is required to honor that principle.”

According to the suit, “Black voters in Baton Rouge are politically cohesive, and recent elections reveal a stark pattern of racially polarized voting that nearly always results in the defeat of Black voters’ preferred candidates in elections and in districts in which the majority of voters are white.” The lawsuit’s complaint walks through the Thornburg v. Gingles and Senate Factors, and provides evidence for why conditions in East Baton Rouge Parish meet each of those factors.

The lawsuit also identifies problems with the way that the Metro Council counted Black voters. The Metro Council’s redistricting consultant initially proposed using the “Any Part Black” counting method endorsed by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But the lawsuit notes that the Metro Council appears to have overridden that recommendation in favor of using a different counting method that excluded residents who identify as both Black and Hispanic.

It’s unfortunate, to say the least, that it’s come to this. East Baton Rouge faces many challenges. Unlike other metropolitan areas, it has not experienced a decrease in crime over the last two years. Education and health outcomes are notoriously poor. There are pressing infrastructure needs. Maybe some of these problems are a product of the fact that certain parts of the population have long lived under a political system that does not fairly or accurately represent them. The Metro Council had a chance to rectify that to some extent. Instead, a majority of its members decided to pass a map that allows misrepresentation to persist. Now it will be up to the courts, at great cost to local taxpayers, to decide.  

Peter Robins-Brown is the executive director of Louisiana Progress and William Most is an attorney at Most & Associates, a civil rights law firm based in Louisiana that brought this lawsuit.