By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court foreclosed on Wednesday one of the main remaining means by which civil rights activists could enforce a landmark voting rights law’s protections against racial discrimination in seven mostly Midwestern states.
The 2-1 panel of the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private plaintiffs cannot use an 1871 civil rights law as a means to enforce protections enshrined in the Voting Rights Act.
The court reached that conclusion as it reversed a judge’s ruling finding that Republican-led North Dakota’s 2021 legislative redistricting plan unlawfully diluted the voting power of Native Americans.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the ruling, if allowed to stand, would weaken voters’ ability in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota to challenge unfair voting maps.
Those states are within the jurisdiction of the 8th Circuit, which had already severely restricted the ability of their voters to file lawsuits challenging voting maps when it held in 2023 that only the government and not private plaintiffs can pursue cases enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Two members of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority have suggested in past cases that private plaintiffs do not have a right to pursue such cases, even though the vast majority of Voting Rights Act lawsuits for decades have been filed by private parties, not the U.S. Department of Justice.
Against that backdrop, civil rights advocates last year opted against appealing the 2023 ruling to the Supreme Court, citing the availability of an alternative mechanism for plaintiffs to still pursue voting rights cases.
That avenue was Section 1983, an 1871 law enacted in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, which gives people the power to sue in federal court when state officials violate their constitutional or statutory rights.
A federal judge in North Dakota relied on it when he sided with the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe and three voters in holding that the state’s 2021 redistricting plan unlawfully diluted Native Americans’ voting strength.
But U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Gruender, writing for the majority in Wednesday’s decision, said Congress did not speak with a “clear voice” to unambiguously confer an individual right in Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 that could be enforced through Section 1983.
Mark Gaber, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Campaign Legal Center, in a statement said “this radical decision will hobble the most important anti-discrimination voting law.”
His group did not say whether it would pursue further appeals, but the plaintiffs could either ask the full 8th Circuit to rehear the case or ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review it.
Republican presidents appointed all three judges who heard the appeal, including U.S. Circuit Judge Steve Colloton, the lone dissenter.
He said the majority was wrong and that, under its logic, the more than 400 lawsuits that have resulted in judicial decisions brought under the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 since 1982 should have been dismissed.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Diane Craft)
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