Campaign Legal Center, with co-counsel UCLA Voting Rights Project, is representing a group of Florida voters challenging the state’s newly drawn congressional map as a partisan gerrymander in violation of the Florida Constitution.
Back to topStates across the country are redrawing their congressional districts in an unprecedented mid-decade race to the bottom to reshape voting maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Florida has joined this race, attempting to implement a map that violates the state constitution and silences voters.
Passed during a special session called by Governor...
In 2010, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed the Fair Districts Amendment (FDA), a state constitutional amendment aimed at preventing partisan gerrymandering in the drawing of congressional and state legislative districts.
As a result, in establishing congressional district boundaries in Florida, “[n]o apportionment plan or individual district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” The FDA also provides a second tier of requirements for congressional districts, including that districts be equally populated, compact and, where feasible, utilize existing political and geographic boundaries.
In June 2025, the Trump administration began urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps in ways that would benefit the Republican Party in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. Just one month later, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began to signal his willingness to engage in mid-decade redistricting in his state.
In December 2025, Governor DeSantis announced that he would call a special session of the Florida Legislature to redraw the congressional map in the coming spring. In April 2026, after unilaterally announcing that Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment was illegal — even though no court had made this determination — Governor DeSantis’ office released a new gerrymandered congressional map drawn entirely in secret with no input from the public or the Legislature.
The map drawer also admitted that he used partisan data in drawing every district in the plan. Less than 48 hours later, the map had been passed by both houses of the Florida Legislature, and Governor DeSantis signed it into law.
The most significant change in the new map is its elimination of half of the Democratic-leaning seats in the state, reducing the number of such districts from four to eight and increasing the total number of Republican-leaning districts from 20 to 24.
Campaign Legal Center, along with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, subsequently filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of Florida voters. The lawsuit argues that the new map violates the Florida Constitution’s express prohibition on partisan gerrymandering, both as a whole and specifically with regard to the new districts drawn in the Tampa Bay and Orlando areas.
The lawsuit also alleges that the map violates two other aspects of the same provision in the Florida Constitution: 1) a prohibition on redistricting with the intent to favor or disfavor incumbents, and 2) a requirement to utilize political and geographic boundaries.
The plaintiffs have asked the court to rule that Florida’s new congressional map is a violation of the state’s constitution and to block the implementation of the new gerrymandered map.
