MIAMI — When the architect of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new voting maps sat down to draw new congressional boundaries, he started with the goal of blowing up a majority Black district in South Florida.

Jason Poreda, a staffer in the governor’s office, told lawmakers this week that breaking up the Broward and Palm Beach district first created by a federal court in 1992 to ensure Black voters’ representation in Congress was his top priority. The rest of the changes to Florida’s district boundaries radiated from there, he said.

DeSantis took a victory lap after the Legislature passed the new district maps, celebrating Florida’s newly drawn District 20, drawn with boundaries that should strengthen Republican control over more of South Florida.

“Another racial gerrymander bites the dust,” he wrote on social media.

But while his office is touting the new maps as a “race-neutral” correction, advocates for minority political power and Black candidates seeking office this November say the result is anything but.

Voting-rights groups say DeSantis’ new maps, first published by Fox News showing a sea of Republican red across the state, don’t just unfairly advantage the GOP, but also the white communities that make up the majority of the party’s voter base.

Once the governor signs the maps into law, 86% of Florida’s congressional districts will favor the GOP, even though just 41% of voters are registered Republicans — and 80% of those voters are white.

“It’s not race- neutral because what’s behind that color red are white people,” April England-Albright, the legal director of Black Voters Matter said. “It just means that white people have the majority power to determine who goes to Congress.”

DeSantis’ central focus on District 20 drives straight to a central question in this week’s Supreme Court ruling on the federal Voting Rights Act: When does giving white majorities disproportional power count as racial gerrymandering?

Under Florida’s newly passed map: the only two South Florida Democratic-leaning district seats held by Black representatives were redrawn in a way that makes all of the surrounding districts more competitive for Republicans, a method of map drawing that anti-gerrymandering advocates refer to as “packing” and “cracking” minority communities to increase majority power.

Rep. Frederica Wilson’s district, FL-24, is more concentrated with Black voters than before — “packing” Black voters into the district and ensuring the surrounding districts have larger white majorities. Wilson declined to comment.

The seat formerly held by Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, FL-20, pulls neighborhoods previously in her district into surrounding white majority districts — “cracking” Black majority areas to weaken their collective voting power. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

In the Orlando area, the new maps also “crack” Hispanic-majority, primarily Puerto Rican neighborhoods into multiple surrounding Republican-leaning districts filled with white majorities, instead of being drawn together as they were in the previous map.

In South Florida, District 20 congressional candidate Luther Campbell said the new map does a disservice to Black voters in parts of Palm Beach County, such as Pahokee, Belle Glade and parts of Riviera Beach who were drawn out of District 20 and into white majority, Republican-leaning districts.

“They won’t be represented by somebody familiar with their district and their needs and concerns,” he said.

Elijah Manley, who is also running to represent the district, echoed those sentiments.

“It sends a message that their voices don’t matter, and that the governor can silence their voices anytime he wishes, regardless of what people think.”

He also gave a sharp warning on social media to white Democrats whose surrounding districts now favor Republicans and might be considering running in the newly drawn District 20.

“Let me be more explicit: any white incumbent that attempts to carpetbag and run in the new CD-20 is a Jim Crow Democrat and will face united opposition from the black community.”

For months, Cherfilus-McCormick has raised alarms about her district being at the center of Florida’s redistricting effort. She was proven right this week.

“The biggest change because we are drawing this map in a race-neutral way: we did not recreate Congressional District 20,” Poreda told a House committee about the district.

Poreda said he used partisan data to draw the new map, which cuts the number of Democratic favoring congressional seats in Florida, where there are 28 districts, from eight to four.

Florida is unique in that it has a voter-approved prohibition on partisan gerrymandering. But Florida’s new voting maps hinge on a legal theory that DeSantis’ office says undermines that ban.

His office’s attorney David Axelman told lawmakers that if the Supreme Court bars considering race when drawing voting maps, the section of Florida’s partisan gerrymandering ban mentioning racial discrimination is unconstitutional, and therefore the full ban is too.

This is likely to be a key point in the legal challenge voting-rights groups and Democrats have vowed to file once DeSantis signs the new maps into effect — particularly because the Supreme Court didn’t ban the consideration of race entirely this week, but rather set a much higher bar for when it can be taken into account.

Genesis Robinson, executive director of nonpartisan voting nonprofit Equal Ground, whose mission is to build Black political power, said the Legislature’s decision to pass the maps this week was a “slap in the face” to Florida voters and also ignores the state’s own Fair Districts Amendment passed by 63% of voters.

He said the midyear redistricting in part erases the gains made in 1992, when the state elected its first three Black congressional representatives since Reconstruction.

The move came after Black Democrats aligned with white Republican legislators to convince a federal court to create three congressional districts to elect the state’s first Black member of Congress since 1876.

A 1992 redrawn map resulted in three Black Democrats being elected to Congress at that time: Corrine Brown in Jacksonville, Alcee Hastings in Broward County and Carrie Meek in Miami-Dade County, and gave those communities minority representation at the federal level for the first time in history.

“This is not something that we should be quiet about,” Robinson said. “Our democracy only works when everybody has a seat at the table and is able to participate by way of their vote, by way of their representation and by way of their voice.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Louisiana v. Callais determined that considering race at all in drawing maps can qualify as illegal racial gerrymandering, even if it’s being considered as a remedy to racially discriminatory maps that dilute Black voters’ power.

The Supreme Court’s dissenters in this week’s 6-3 ruling, authored by Justice Elena Kagan, said states can now argue they are drawing districts to favor parties — not white people — even if the effect is that white voters have disproportionate voting power.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was intended as a remedy to exactly the problem of the supposedly “race-neutral” laws that were disproportionately benefitting white voters.

“What the majority means is that if the State has used non-race-based criteria (whether political or non-political) to draw its districts, then Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] has nothing to say,” Kagan wrote. “Even though those criteria produce a world … in which minority voters, compared to their White neighbors, have ‘less opportunity’ to ‘elect representatives of their choice.’”

England-Albright, the Black Voters Matter legal director, said the “race-neutral” maps Florida lawmakers are defending under the new ruling were built using the same logic of the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era that led to the Voting Rights Act’s passage in the first place.

“Just like back in the day, you had all of these ‘race-neutral laws’ that did not mention race,” she said. “But in application they were, with razor sharp precision, discriminating against Black people.”

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